Bio: Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate in History at The Ohio State University. Based on archival, oral history, and library research conducted in Tajikistan between in 2022 and 2023, his dissertation, “Cotton Modernity: Agricultural Labor, Materialism, and Soviet Power in Tajikistan, 1945-1991” explores on the development of the cotton sector in late-Soviet Tajikistan, exploring how immense global technological changes in large-scale industrial farming shaped lives, labor, and environment in this former Soviet Republic. He has been involved in various projects which seek to improve connections between scholars and institutions based in North America and Central Asia, including the Central Asia Research Cluster: Knowledge Production & The Periphery Revisited (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and Slavic Review) and UCLA’s Modern Endangered Languages Program,  which helped fund a collaborative training and digitization project between George Mason University and the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature at the Tajik Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.