Christopher Baker
American University of Central AsiaChristopher Baker received his PhD from Indiana's Central Eurasian Studies program. He is the Director of the Central Asian Studies Institute (CASI) and an Assistant Professor in the Core Humanities at AUCA. His research focuses on the literary imagination of classification in the Eurasian steppe and on the efforts of Kazakh artists to make sense of what it meant to be categorized in imperial and Soviet experiments, themes he explored in his dissertation, Ethnic Words and Soviet Things. He is the founder, organizer, and chair of the Literature and History in Central Asia workshop, a forum created in 2014 to help make literature a legitimate field in Central Asian studies. His institute is also home to the Central Asian Cinema Forum, a seminar for student and professional filmmakers in the region that was first held in 2022. As the director of CASI, Christopher heads one of the few Central Asia centers solely focused on the promotion of research into the arts and humanities of the region.
Email: [email protected]