Otto's Random Thoughts

Last night at about 10 pm I got an unexpected phone call. It turned out it was an employee of the BBC and she wanted to know if the figure o...

Recently I have been reading a lot about Stalin's 1937 deportation of the Russian-Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzb...

Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism ICP 3 Credits International and Comparative Politics American University of Central Asia Fall Semester 2008 ...

Recently I have been doing some historical consulting on a script for a movie. The film company is actually based in NY, however, not Hollyw...

Lately I have been reading and thinking a lot about diasporas. In particular I have noticed that many diasporas are the result of multiple d...

Today I paid my electric bill at the main post office. The good news is that utility rates are still stuck in the Brezhnev era. The bad news...

I have now have a new visa, new registration, new work permit and new contract for the upcoming 2008-2009 school year.

For the last couple of days it has been really hot and humid here. Granted it is not as hot as Arizona or as humid as Virginia. But, still i...

Last night along with some friends and colleagues I enjoyed a dinner cooked by some Turkmen students here at AUCA. We ate Turkmen style plov...

Yesterday it occurred to me that despite the constant repetition that race is a "social construct" that this is in fact not true. ...

I wish all of my American readers a Happy Fourth of July.

I recently read Paul Nazaroff, trans. Malcolm Burr, Hunted Through Central Asia: On the run from Lenin's Secret Police (Oxford: OUP, 200...

Last semester I caught one out of every five of my students plagiarising. So for next semester I have revised my official policy on plagiari...

The weather here is absolutely beautiful. I walked through a couple of parks earlier today. Everything seemed so green.

Yesterday, the office manager informed me I had received a package and that it was waiting for me at Post Office No. 40. I have only receive...

I just finished reading another anthology of scholarly articles. Yaacov Ro'i, ed., Democracy and Pluralism in Muslim Eurasia (London: Fr...

Yesterday the girlfriend made a huge pot of borscht. This, however, was not ordinary borscht. Her grandmother was Koryo Saram (ethnic Korean...

I just finished reading the short collection of essays, Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997). One of th...

I just finished reading Wayne S. Vucinich, ed. , Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples (Stanford, CA: Hoov...

The Russian-German population of Kyrgyzstan avoided deportation during World War II as a result of its distance from the front. They did not...