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.

Motivation: CESS seeks to facilitate communication and interaction among scholars of the region, while also promoting high standards of scholarship and instruction about the region. Since joining the organization in 2017, I have found it a very rewarding organization for learning about others’ research, research practices, and teaching. The COVID-19 pandemic added a series of challenges for the organization, but the leadership managed to coordinate a groundbreaking conference at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent, which I think counts as a step forward in its mission. If elected as a Graduate Student board member, I aim to bring a graduate student (and early career scholar) perspective to the organization and suggest ways that we can better support young scholars and researchers in our field. Additionally, there is still a lot of work to be done to improve equitable collaboration with our colleagues in Central Asia and CESS can play a major role in fulfilling that goal. This requires funding and building partnerships between US-based institutions and institutions in Central Asia. As board member, I will dedicate time to strengthening existing relationships between North American and Central Asian institutions and looking for opportunities to create new ones. Finally, I am interested in learning more about the needs and desires of our membership base and ensuring that CESS as an organization takes steps to better serve our community.