ASEEES 2025: Thoughts on a Conference, Border-Crossers, and "Eurasia"

Monday, November 24, 2025

I just got back from the ASEEES conference in Washington, DC. "ASEEES" stands for "the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies," and it's the main international organization that brings together scholars working in the fields of Russian, East European, and post-Soviet studies. 

As usual, this year's conference brought moments both exhilarating and banal. It's nice--and professionally important--to be able to catch up with people that I hadn't spoken to for years. When I go, say, a decade or so without sitting down and talking with someone, and then suddenly I see them walking toward me in the lobby of the convention hotel, it's an odd sensation. In the best of moments I stop and have a quick chat, renewing old links. At other times I wonder if a person still remembers my face, or if they'd even want to talk to me. 

And, since I typically alternate between this conference and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) meeting, I only get a shot at talking with some people once every two years at best.   

So, it's important to have annual conferences like this, I think especially for someone like myself who lives in what might be considered a rather remote location, at least from the perspective of Russian (or Middle Eastern) studies. It's easy to let old ties fray unintentionally.  

And yes, giving a talk can often be a very satisfying experience, as was the case for me this year. I came away from my panel yesterday feeling like I'd finally figured out how to turn my paper's topic into an academic article, which was nice. At the airport waiting for my plane back to Montana last night, I couldn't resist opening up my computer and copying down all the notes I'd hurriedly taken during my panel in response to the questions and comments that had come up in discussion. 

Border-Crossers

What was most striking about the weekend, however, was the fact that there were so many panels devoted to Russian-Middle Eastern connections. And, in particular, there were a lot of papers relating to people I tend to think of as "border-crossers," i.e. people whose lives were shaped, in one way or another, by their experiences crossing frontiers.  

Why call them "border-crossers?" Well, for one thing, it's a way of classifying immigrants, tourists, refugees, and other cross-border travelers into a single category, which I think can be useful from a scholarly perspective. More importantly, perhaps, it's also a means of looking at experiences that often had a quite profound effect upon individuals, communities, and countries more generally. As scholars who often look most closely at a particular country, border-crossers remind us that a lot of the most interesting stories were international ones. 

"Eurasia"

Anyway, it's a pretty remarkable change. Back when I was in graduate school, numerous professors told me that working on both Russia and the Ottoman Empire/Turkey was unsustainable. At Princeton, in particular, but also at Brown, I was told repeatedly that I needed to "pick one." Fortunately, my advisor at Brown, Engin Akarli, as well as the Russianist that I worked with there, Tom Gleason (who was basically a second advisor to me), believed in the feasibility of what I was doing.  

Today, I doubt anyone working in the field would dismiss the idea of working on Russia and the Middle East. Over the last couple of decades, the number of young, interesting scholars working on the two fields has expanded exponentially. This is particularly the case with graduate students, several of whom I got a chance to talk to this past weekend. All in all, very cool. 

Years ago, ASEEES was called AAASS (the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies), which was fondly referred to as "Triple Ass" by Tom Gleason. The name change, which some people criticized, was more than a cosmetic shift. Adding the term "Eurasia" to the organization's name, and moving beyond a seemingly more exclusive focus on "Slavic studies," was a good idea, and I think the state of the field today has really been bolstered by the inclusion of dozens of scholars at this year's conference discussing topics that might not have found a ready home in the old Triple Ass.