Central Asian Studies Institute (CASI) at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) is one of the few academic institutions devoted to the Central Asian region with a sustained emphasis on literature, art and history. Its Global Borderlands Project funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a deeply humanistic enterprise, grounded in the notion that literature and history have something to tell us about being off center among scattered traditions. The Project focuses on network research and teaching expertise on borderlands and other indeterminate spaces in which local and more distinctly colonial and/or global traditions have collided. Centered around small, intensive workshops, the project is concerned with the messiness of being human – with the languages and heritages that are tangled together in human communities and traditions – and with the borders, figurative and literal, that apportion this complexity into more limiting categories.

CASI collaborates with the Eur-Asian Border Lab in pilot research, teaching, networking and organizing a Summer School at its premises in Bishkek, coordinated by Dr Christopher Baker and Dr Svetlana Jacquesson.


The Eur-Asian Border Lab gains from and collaborates with other scholars around the world. We will regularly update the list of research affiliates, new projects and partnerships