You must register by 5pm on October 10, 2024 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian History Workshop with Zukhra Kasimova.

Zukhra Kasimova’s paper reconstructs arguably the most renowned wartime Soviet adoption story of the Uzbek adoptive parents (Sha)Akhmed Shamakhmudov and Bakhri Akramova. By placing the family story in the broader sociopolitical context, this paper underscores the role of regional political actors in reconfiguring the Soviet postwar “Friendship of the Peoples” paradigm and decenters the symbolic role of Slavic/Russian “elder brother” in the multiethnic Soviet “family of nations.”

Interested participants should contact Taylor Zajicek (tcz2107@columbia.edu) to receive a copy of the paper in advance of the workshop.

Zukhra Kasimova is an Assistant Professor of Eurasian History at Bucknell University. In 2020-21, Kasimova was a visiting fellow at the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2023). She is working on her first monograph, “Hybrid Sovietness: Modernity, Nationality, and Provinciality in Postwar Central Asia, 1941-1985.”