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Please join The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) for a talk by Tim Nunan (University of Regensburg) on April 15 at 4:00 in the Malott Room of the Kansas Memorial Union. Dr. Nunan's talk is titled "Transitions: Examining Changing Regimes of Sexuality in Post-Soviet Muslim Republics, 1985-2001."The disintegration of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nation-states coincided with profound changes in human sexuality and the emergence of Islamist ideologies in international politics. The HIV/AIDS epidemic fueled prejudices against homosexuality, while the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the coup d’état in Turkey created a favorable environment for political Islam.
However, the ways in which these two dynamics—changes in global discourses around gender and sexuality and regional political shifts—affected the nationalism that emerged in post-Soviet states remain under-examined. This is particularly true for the Muslim-majority republics of the former Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. While scholars have explored Russia’s transition from the repeal of Article 121 to Vladimir Putin’s embrace of “traditional values,” much less is known about the post-Soviet journey of the former Muslim-majority republics.
In his exploratory talk, Timothy Nunan will outline the agenda behind a new binational project jointly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project explores several questions: What were the prevailing norms of sexuality in the periphery of late Soviet socialism? How did these norms shift as the planned economy collapsed and new nations emerged, influenced by Turkey and Iran? How might a history of the transitions from the regimes of sexuality of the late Soviet period to new nationhood, told not from Moscow but from Baku and Bishkek, change our understanding of the history of sexuality under (post-)socialism?
Timothy Nunan is Professor for Transregional Cultures of Knowledge in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies at the University of Regensburg. His research encompasses international history, Russian and Soviet history, and the history of the modern Middle East. Before joining Regensburg, he led a Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Research Group at the Free University of Berlin, during which he authored a forthcoming book on the transformation of Shi'a Islamism through the Cold War and decolonization. His first book, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan, explores the history of international development in Afghanistan during the Cold War, with a focus on the roles of the Soviet Union and Western humanitarian NGOs. Alongside Professor Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds), Nunan has received a DFG-AHRC research grant to study changing regimes of sexuality and nationalism in Central Asia and the Caucasus from approximately 1979 to 2001.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Kansas Union, The University Of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States
