Dear members of the IAUNRC community,
Greetings to you as IAUNRC beings the 2022-23 academic year. We are full of hope that in-person activities will rejoin the virtual ones that boomed during the pandemic, bringing everyone interested in societies from Finland across Iran and the “Stans” to Mongolia together in even larger numbers spanning the globe.
Hearty congratulations and heartfelt thanks to Toivo, Kasia, student staffers, and Central Eurasian Studies department faculty for their hard work yielding resounding success in the recent US Department of Education Title VI applications. IAUNRC continues as a National Resource and a Foreign Language and Areas Studies Fellowship granting center for the next four years!
Deep gratitude must be expressed toward Professor Toivo Raun for his many years of service to IAUNRC as a board member, associate director, and director. I humbly follow in his footsteps as the IAUNRC’s newest director. A new group of highly respected and well travelled advisory board members will guide me.
In the years ahead, the IAUNRC will buttress its past focuses on the heartland of Eurasia while expanding into new areas of supporting research, teaching, and outreach that link with East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Western Europe over land and across water.
You can expect to witness multiple collaborations not just with other national resource centers within IU but also with minority serving institutions and community colleges across the US. IAUNRC will be involved with the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival and will host the Central Eurasian Studies Society annual international conference this fall. Looking further ahead, IAUNRC will bring to IUB an exhibition on the Assyrian-American community’s past in Iran and Iraq plus its relocation to North America.
So, please visit our website and attend our events in person or via the internet.
Jamsheed Choksy
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies