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Traveling the Silk Road

June 27, 2012

Traveling the Silk Road

Scott Levi's new $137,252 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant is funding an exceptional learning opportunity for middle and high school teachers: the History Department's Central Asia in World History Summer Institute, July 15-27.

The twenty-five teachers from across the country attending the two-week program have their work cut out for them; they will get a crash course in the region’s historical connections to larger, global processes from the ancient Silk Road and nomadic empires to today’s paved highways.

The goal is to give the teachers the foundation they need to build exciting, relevant new programs for their students.

The teachers were chosen from more than 70 applicants based on essays detailing their reasons for applying, their qualifications to do the work required by the project and to contribute to the Institute, and how their plans to use the experience will benefit their teaching.

“I am very impressed with the qualifications of our participants. These are really talented, dedicated teachers who are enthusiastic about applying what they learn to enhance their curriculum and develop a world history program,” Levi, who is an associate professor of history, said.

When Levi applied for NEH funding for the Institute in 2011, his challenge was to explain why his proposal would be a good investment in terms of what makes Central Asia relevant today. Clearly, he did a good job; Levi received a $137,252 NEH grant on the first go-round—an exceptional feat.

“For starters, I pointed out that this is a region directly next door and historically connected with Afghanistan, and Iraq as well—so it is today and has long been of great geopolitical importance,” Levi related.

”The area also has both a wealth of oil and natural gas reserves and of course, it also neighbors Russia and China,” he added.

Geographically, Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to East Turkestan (modern day Xinjiang, China) in the east, and from the steppes of Russia in the north to northern Afghanistan and northeastern Iran in the south.

“The key feature of this Institute is that over time we will have the opportunity to touch the lives of literally tens of thousands of students, as our twenty-five teachers go back and develop their curricula and apply what they have learned in their own institutions.

“So the long-term payback is huge; the students of these teachers will become policymakers, businesspeople, teachers, parents. If nothing else, what they have learned in the courses that their teachers shape will make them better-informed citizens more able to understand complex global issues.”

The Institute’s rigorous program combines carefully selected readings along with a series of lectures from experts in a variety of areas; discussions; analysis of primary material, both narrative and documentary; screenings and discussion of relevant films; immersion in traditional food and music of the region; and the development of unit plans for classroom use.

Food and music will definitely be woven into Institute offerings. Levi, who not only knows his way around Central Asia, but also around the kitchen, will provide a cooking demonstration he calls, “Culinary Adventures along the Silk Road,” for the lucky NEH Summer Scholars on July 21.

Also on July 21, The Silk Road Ensemble, (http://www.silkroadensemble.com), led by the Azerbaijani ethno-musicologist and historian Shahyar Daneshgar, will perform traditional music of Central Asia from 1-4 pm in the Ohio Union U.S. Bank Conference Theatre. This event is free and open to the public.

But NEH Summer Scholars will spend significant hours in classes and in the library studying key features of the region’s history and honing their research skills. They will be grounded in the defining features of Central Asian history and the region’s historical connections to larger, global processes.

Situated at the heart of the so-called Silk Road, the peoples of Central Asia witnessed numerous invasions, migrations, and exchanges of religions and cultures, goods and technologies. The region not only connected great civilizations of the Eurasian periphery, but gave rise to world empires of its own.

Understanding its past provides a window on Central Asia’s significance today as an extraordinarily important geopolitical zone in our post-Soviet, twenty-first century world--embedded in events and conflicts that continue to unfold in Russia and the Caucasus, China, Iran and Afghanistan.

"Actually, Ohio State is becoming a nexus of scholarly inquiry on Central Asia. Last September Associate Professor Morgan Liu of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and I, co-hosted the annual conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. This four-day conference brought together nearly 250 scholars from across the globe," Levi said.

NEH Summer Scholars will receive a certificate as documentation for in-service/professional development hours. Additionally, participants have the opportunity to receive graduate credit hours.

The NEH Summer Institute, Central Asia in World History (http://hti.osu.edu/centralasia), is offered under the umbrella of Ohio State University’s Department of History and its Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching. The Goldberg Center’s History Teaching Institute (HTI) provides extensive e-learning opportunities and services for high school history teachers around the nation.

Institute Director: Scott Levi, history, Ohio State, is author of, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade: 1550-1900 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), which examines the emergence, social organization, and decline of an Indian merchant diaspora in Central Asia and the role that the Indian merchants played in Central Asian society.

Institute Faculty: Carter Findley, history, Ohio State, is recognized as a leader in the fields of Islamic and world history;

Adeeb Khalid, Asian Studies and history, Carleton College, is a historian of the sedentary societies of Central Asia from the time of the Russian conquest of the 1860s to the present;

Nurten Kilic-Schubel, history, Kenyon College, is a specialist in political culture, state formation, and Islam in medieval and early modern Central Asia;

Timothy May, history, North Georgia College and State University, specializes in the Mongol Empire and other nomadic based empires;

Daniel Prior, history, Miami University of Ohio, specializes in the history of northern Kirghiz chieftains (manaps) during the Russian colonial expansion into the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;

Ron Sela, Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, is a specialist in the history of Central Asia in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, with a focus on political and cultural self-representation in Central Asian sources.

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