CAI Academics

Degree Programs

Yale offers four academic programs that provide instruction on Central Asia.

Undergraduate Degree Programs

Graduate Degree Programs

CAI Courses

Note that courses may not be offered every semester

Course	Description
RSEE 009 RUSS 026 Culture and Everyday Life in Central Asia	This course explores the cultures of Central Asia, including the former Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan), and Xinjiang. Students will encounter a range of literature, film, music and performance, material culture, and food culture. Students will apply a critical eye to the ways Central Asians have constructed their identities and their region, and the ways outsiders have represented and misrepresented Central Asia across time. The course begins with a historical overview of the region through a critical analysis of several popular misconceptions. In three subsequent units, focused on steppe nomadism, urban life, and mobility and migration, students will critically engage with the ways that colonialism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and other political forces have shaped Central Asian lifeways and cultures. Students will visit the Beinecke Library and the Peabody Museum to encounter a range of Central Asia-related holdings at Yale. In an on-campus concert and a cooking demo, students will also encounter the Central Asian diaspora communities in New York and Connecticut.
RLST 127 Buddhist Thought: The Foundations
PERS 155 Middle Persian
PERS 156 Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian
RLST 186 Fear, Suffering, Anger, Love: Buddhist Philosophy of Mind
HSAR 266 Introduction to Islamic Architecture
RLST 287 Islamic Theology and Philosophy
HIST 293 RSEE 325 RUSS 325 URBN 303 Ten Eurasian Cities	This course delves into the histories and identities of ten cities spanning Central and Northern Eurasia: Bukhara, Samarkand, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Magnitogorsk, Tashkent, Baku, and Astana. Our exploration will encompass a diverse range of scholarly perspectives, drawing from historical records, visual materials, and literary texts to illuminate their development and unique traits. The primary objective of the seminar is to acquaint participants with the socio-political dynamics inherent to these cities, including their urban layouts and architectural features. It will also provide a comprehensive overview of essential concepts and methodologies pertinent to the study of cities and the ongoing process of urbanization in Central and Northern Eurasia.
NELC 325 The Education of Princes: Medieval Advice Literature of Rulership and Counsel
ANTH 347 Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity in Soviet & Post-Soviet Debates	This course examines debates about race, ethnicity, and diversity in Russia and the former Soviet Union. We examine how discourses of ethnicity and culture produce and reproduce ideas of race, including racelessness, Blackness, “nativeness,” and unmarked Russianness. Bringing together readings and methods from history and anthropology and taking advantage of the robust Internet culture of blogs, memes, and videos, this course examines how politics and culture meet in contemporary debates about representation. We read ethnographic texts that represent the experiences of African Americans, Roma, Muslim immigrants from Central Asia, the peoples of the Caucasus, Indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Far North, and Russians. As we shift our focus east from the transatlantic, this course contributes to decentering binaries of Blackness and whiteness to look at how local racial formations interact with global discourses of race and racism.
HIST 398J RUSS 329 MMES 300 RSEE 329 Intro to Modern Central Asia	An overview of the history of modern Central Asia—modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. This course shows Central Asia to be a pivotal participant in some of the major global issues of the 20th and 21st centuries, from environmental degradation and Cold War, to women’s emancipation and postcolonial nation-building, to religion and the rise of mass society. It also includes an overview of the region’s longer history, of the conquests by the Russian and Chinese empires, the rise of Islamic modernist reform movements, the Bolshevik victory, World War II, the perestroika, and the projects of post-Soviet nation-building. Readings in history are supplemented by such primary sources as novels and poetry, films and songs, government decrees, travelogues, courtly chronicles, and the periodical press. All readings and discussions in English.
EAST 406 HSAR 352 Introduction to Central Asian Art and Architecture	Overview of the art and architecture of Central Asia including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, in addition to Afghanistan and Xinjiang, from the Late Antiquity to the modern day. Examination of artistic, architectural-urban transformations as a reflection of the broader societal and cultural change. Through readings, we challenge ourselves 1) to reconsider some of the prevailing understandings of Central Asian history/art & architectural history and 2) to perceive the built environment as an artifact that uncovers secrets and affirms political, social, cultural, and economic aspects of the human past. Throughout, we focus on interactions across the Eurasian continent among Sogdians, Turks, Persians, Arabs, Chinese, Mongolian nomads, and Russians during the last millennium and a half, to understand how these cultures shaped Central Asian urban landscapes, art, and architectural styles. Previous knowledge of Central Asian history is helpful but by no means necessary. Previous knowledge of Art & Architectural history is helpful but by no means necessary.
LITR 423 Politics and Literature in Iran and Afghanistan
NELC 441 Introduction to Classical Persian
NELC 442 Classical Persian Prose
RLST 541 Dreams, Demons, and You
NELC 556 Classics: The Arabic-Islamic World
ARBC 561 Arabic Seminar: Scientific Writing
RLST 592 Society and Religion on the Silk Road
PERS 602 Introduction to Classical Persian Literature: The Epic
ARCH 3106 EMST 748 HSAR 783 Circa 1600	This seminar focuses on the art , architecture, and urbanism of early modern empires across West, Central and South Asia, namely, the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Shibanid, and their political and economic ties across the world. The year 1600 is an important temporal hinge, at the height of socio-political migrations and before the realization of full-scale European colonial ambitions. It is also the period of absolutism and millenarian activity, of slavery and the novel, and the institution of new religious and ethnic allegiances. In this manner art and architectural history served at the nexus of commensurability and competition, where artists, merchants, and missionaries crossed geographic and disciplinary borders in order to imagine a new world and their place within it.
SLAV 810 Proseminar: Central Asian Culture and History	This seminar provides a comprehensive exploration of scholarly approaches and recent debates in the domains of Central Asian history, spanning from the 19th century to the 21st century. During the first five weeks, we will discuss the state of the art in Central Asian history and historiographical shifts that have occurred in the field of Central Asian studies over the past half-century. Subsequent sessions will revolve around specific themes, delving into the environmental, urban, cultural, and socio-political dimensions of Central Asian history. The seminar encompasses participant presentations, guest lectures, and contributions from Yale faculty whose research revolves around Central Asia.
PERS 858 Early New Persian for Arabists	Early New Persian is the earliest stage of the Persian language written in the Arabic script up to the twelfth century. It is attested first in Central Asia after the Islamic conquests and became more widespread with the coming of the Seljuqs. This course introduces advanced readers of Arabic to Early New Persian for the purposes of reading for research. After an initial rapid introduction of the grammar, most of the course is spent reading excerpts of important early prose texts. Samples of poetry, as well as Early Judaeo-Persian texts, written in a similar dialect in the Hebrew script, are also introduced.
HIST 868 Documents in Tang, Song, and Yuan Dynasties
HIST 881 China’s Age of Exploration