This seminar will explore the 15th and 16th-century historiographies of Central Asia as written about during the Cold War, and compare and contrast the approaches of Russian-language and Anglophone scholars. Gulandom Yuldasheva will present on “The Timurid Renaissance Revisited: Maria Subtelny and the Soviet Construction of Alisher Navoi,” and illuminate how academics interpreted the complexity of medieval Central Asia’s cultural renaissance and reshaped it to serve contemporary agendas. The legacy of these approaches continues to shape the study of the historical figure Navoi and the Timurid period in which he lived, raising broader questions about historiography, ideology, and cultural memory.

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp will discuss “The ‘Iran’ Curtain: Cold-War Scholarship on Illustrated Abu’l-Khayrid (Shaybanid) Arts of the Book from 16th-century Central Asia.” Her art historical focus dwells on the classificatory interpretation of illustrated manuscripts from a dynasty that has remained understudied for political reasons both in the Soviet Union and outside. She will analyze how English and Russian-speaking academicians have situated the dynasty's arts in the trajectory of Persianate manuscript production resulting in intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars.

Gulandom Yuldasheva is a scholar specializing in Turkic literature, Islamic history, and the cultural legacy of Central Asia. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Turkish Studies and the Russian language from Tashkent State University, Uzbekistan, where she also completed her Master’s degree in Islamic History. Following her graduate studies, she worked extensively at the Institute of Oriental Studies named after Beruni under the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, focusing on Turkic literary manuscripts. Currently, Ms. Yuldasheva is a PhD candidate at the Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies, where her dissertation explores the Timurid Renaissance in 15th-century Herat. 

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in Islamic Civilizations and the Arabic language. Her first MA program was in the History of Art at Williams College in Massachusetts (USA). She was a recipient of the Fulbright Grant in Tajikistan and there learned Farsi and Tajiki. She received a doctorate degree from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and wrote a dissertation about the art of the Abu'l-Khayrid dynasty in Transoxiana during the 16th century, and their diplomatic exchanges between courts within Central Asia and the broader Turco-Persianate sphere encompassing Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals. At present, Dr. Comstock-Skipp is a Leverhulme Early Career researcher at the University of Oxford writing a monograph about Abu'l-Khayrid manuscript arts.