Claire Roosien

Claire Roosien's picture
Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Address: 
HQ 539
203-432-0997

CV:  Claire Roosien.pdf

ON LEAVE SPRING 2024

I am a cultural historian of modern Eurasia. At Yale, I teach courses on modern Central Asia, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, and Russian empire and imperialism. My book-in-progress, Socialism Mediated: Culture, Propaganda, and the Public in Early Soviet Uzbekistan, examines how Central Asian cultural intermediaries imagined and mobilized mass participation through Socialist Realist cultural production: poetry, novels, film, newspapers, and material culture, among other media. Drawing on published and archival sources in several Eurasian languages, I posit the category of the “state public” to describe the contested imaginaries of state control and public participation, which were particularly fraught along lines of gender and ethnicity. In my analysis, Socialist Realism emerges as a mode for public-formation, much as ego-documents have been examined as modes for the formation of a Soviet subjectivity. From this project, my article on the Red Teahouse as an institution of the state public in Central Asia appeared in Kritika in Summer 2021, and an article on textiles as propaganda for Central Asian women appeared in Central Asian Survey in Winter 2022.

Other projects at the research stage include: Eurasian performance culture as national and imperial representation, childcare on Uzbekistan’s collective farms, and the role of the Mughals in late Soviet nation-building in Central Asia and cultural diplomacy in South Asia. I also have an interest in literary translation and have published several translations of literary works from the Uzbek.

Before coming to Yale, I taught courses in Russian history, the Development of Western Civilization, and women’s and gender studies in the Department of History and Classics at Providence College.

Education:

AB, University of Chicago, 2010

AM, University of Chicago, 2014

PhD, University of Chicago, 2019

Interests:

Central Eurasian literature and culture

Cultural history

Culture and ideology

Comparative history

Minorities and minoritization in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union

Soviet culture

Socialist Realism

Orthodox Christianity

Working Languages:

Uzbek

Russian

Turkish

Persian/ Tajik

Chuvash

Selected Publications:

Peer-reviewed articles

“‘Not Just Tea Drinking’: The Red Teahouse and the Soviet State Public in Interwar Uzbekistan.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 22, no. 3 (2021): 479–510.

“I Dress in Silk and Velvet: Women, Textiles, and the Textile-Text in 1930s Uzbekistan,” Central Asian Survey (forthcoming).

Other publications

“Official Culture and Tactical Discourse in Kirill Tomoff’s ‘Uzbek Music’s Separate Path: Interpreting ‘Anticosmopolitanism’ in Stalinist Central Asia, 1949-52,’” Russian Review e-feature (2021).

“Not By Archives Alone: The ‘Revolution’ in Soviet Central Asian Literary Studies,” Iranian Studies archival report (forthcoming).

(Review) Shoshana Keller, Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence, University of Toronto Press, Russian Review (September 2021).

(Review) Leah Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus, Cornell University Press, International Journal of Middle East Studies (forthcoming).

Translations

Translations of Abdulla Qahhor, “Pomegranates” and “Earthquake”; and selected Zulfiya and Oydin poems, with introductions, in Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature, Palgrave Macmillan Press (forthcoming).

Commentary on and translations of Uzbek women’s poetry, published in Alexander Street database Women and Social Movements in Modern Europe Since 1820, 2016.