Hittin' the conference circuit

November 26, 2014

As a Turk across empires, I’m no stranger to travel. Even for me, however, the last several days have been pretty tiring. ‘Tis the season for my annual scholarly conferences, so it’s been a pretty hectic week. 

On Thursday of last week I flew down from Bozeman to San Antonio in order to attend the ASEEES conference. ASEEES is the Association for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies, which used to be called AAASS (fondly known as ‘Triple Ass”) until they changed it a few years back to bring “Eurasia” into their name. I think the Slavicists who run ASEEES thought they needed to acknowledge the fact that folks like me work on Muslims, yet couldn’t think of a way of doing so without mentioning “Asia.” Typical.

The perfect stocking stuffer

Officially, I was at ASEEES in order to chair a panel on the Russian-Muslim borderlands. The main attraction, however, was what it always is—to catch up with friends and colleagues who work in the field. Amid all the social climbers, star-struck grad students, and grimly aggressive assistant professors whose eyes pan every badge to see if they’re looking at someone worth talking to, it’s always great to see my peops. 

Even the folks that I’m not terribly close to are still people that I can have fun with, or at least people that I’ve had a good time with in the past at archives, workshops and conferences in various places. I’ve got a lot of good memories already, and it seems like whenever I attend one of these conferences they come pouring out. I’ll walk around a corner and suddenly find myself face-to-face with someone I’d had an adventure with in New Orleans, Tbilisi, Kyoto or some such place. 

Probably the best part of this year’s conference was holding my book in my hands for the first time at the ASEEES book fair. That’s right folks, it’s on sale—and just in time for the holidays!  

The most sobering moment in San Antonio came during the course of a conversation I had with a Ukrainian scholar who teaches in Canada. He told me that he’s been planning on visiting his mother in Kyiv during the semester break, but is a little concerned that he might be conscripted while he’s there. I asked him why he was going, and he said he felt that he had to. 
From San Antonio I flew to DC on Sunday. I’m a big fan of the capital city, especially after having lived there for eight months back when I was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2011. In DC I attended the last two days of the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, where I was both presenting a paper and acting as a discussant on another panel. 

At MESA, too, I saw a lot of old friends, people that I’ve met at various points in my life—whether it be graduate school, the archives in Istanbul, or some other workshop or conference. There’s even one guy that I knew from Istanbul in the 1990s—he’d also worked as an English teacher over there. Twenty years ago he’d come over to my apartment in Istanbul to team-grade papers. Now we’re both professors of Ottoman history in the United States. 

Now I’m headed back to the Bozone, where a festive spirit has begun to overtake the Borderlands Lodge. Once again, we’ll be having a big Borderland feast.

So happy Thanksgiving, to those who are celebrating, and may your Turks always be across empires!

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More links, commentary and photographs available poolside at the Borderlands Lounge.