Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Toledo
Toledo, Ohio 43606
(419) 530-5574
Nathan Light's Email
Education |
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| 1998 |
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| 1990 | M.A. in Folklore, Indiana University |
| 1986 |
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Fellowships, Grants and Prizes | |
| 1996 | NEH Summer Seminar: "Ethnic Diversity in China." East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii |
| 1994 | American Folklore Society Folklore Fellow's Prize, Best Student Publication 1993-94 (for monograph Qazaqs in the People's Republic of China: The Local Processes of History) |
| 1993-94 | Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for Dissertation Writing |
| 1993 | Finalist, Harvard Academy Scholars Program |
| 1993 | Grant-in-Aid of Research for Dissertation, Graduate School, Indiana University |
| 1992 | Richard M. Dorson Dissertation Research Grant, Indiana University |
| 1990-91 | MacArthur Fellowship, Indiana Center on Global Change and World Peace, Bloomington, Indiana |
| 1989-90 | Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Chinese) |
| 1988-89 | University Fellowship, Indiana University Graduate School |
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| 2004 | Visiting Assistant Professor, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul. Course: Abbreviated version of History Of Central Asia: Ideas, Culture And Power |
| 2003-05 | Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Toledo. |
| 2002-3 | Visiting Instructor, English Composition, Department of English, University of Toledo. |
| 2001 | Consultant, Uyghur Program, Radio Free Asia, Washington, D.C. |
| 1994-2000 | Adjunct Faculty, University of Toledo. Created and taught anthropology and folklore courses on North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. |
| 1997 | Faculty, University of Toledo Summer Teachers' Seminar: "Folklore and Education: The Humanities in Everyday Life" |
| 1993 | Instructor (Introduction to American Folklore), Indiana University |
| 1991-92 | Assistant Instructor (Introduction to Folklore), Indiana University |
| 1988 | Instructor (World Cultures, English Composition), Tokyo Foreign Language College, Japan |
| 1987 | Instructor (English Language and Literature), Sichuan University, Chengdu, China |
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| 1996-present | Created and maintain a website on Uyghur Culture, History, and Politics: http://homepages.utoledo.edu/nlight/uyghpg.htm. Site contains annotated links to resources, analysis of political and cultural websites pertaining to Uyghurs, photos, chapters from my dissertation, and my bibliographies: “Uyghur language articles on history and literature” (~1000 items), “Imagining the Uyghur Literary Tradition” (70 items, annotated), and “Uyghur Books Published in China” (90 items, annotated). |
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| 70% complete | From Stone Inscriptions to Sufi Classicism: An Interpretive History of Eastern Turkic Literature.
In addition to Turkic oral materials, Central Asian Turkic authors used Chinese, Sogdian, Sanskrit, Arabic,
and Persian writings as sources and models for a number of strikingly original compositions.
These writings bristle with reflexive commentary and transformed elements revealing the authors' complex
intentions within their political and cultural contexts. I examine authors' statements about their
works and their historical settings and show how they used literary style and technique to
re-invent poetics, literary tradition, historical consciousness,
and religious, ethnic and political ideology. I also explore and attempt to account for the
diverse manifestations of certain long-lived stylistic features of Turkic oral and
written poetry and prose. |
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| under review | “Pragmatics, Reported Speech and Managing Information in 8th Century Turkic Narratives” (12,000 words). Under review at Language in Society. |
| in press | Chapter 6, "Sociocultural Diversity" in Forensic Nursing: Concepts and Challenges to be published by Jones and Bartlett in 2004. |
| in press | "Uyghur Folklore" article in Encyclopedia of World Folklore to be published by Greenwood Press. |
| 1999 | "Tabloid Archaeology: Is Television Trivializing Science?" in Discovering Archaeology March-April 1999, pp. 98-101, quoted at About.com's Archaeology Site. More detail online here: Hidden Discourses of Race: Imagining Europeans in China. |
| 1994 | Qazaqs in the People's Republic of China: The Local Processes of History. Indiana Center on Global Change and World Peace, MacArthur Scholar Series, Occasional Paper No. 22, Bloomington, Indiana, 118 pages |
| 1994 | "Pizza in 30 Minutes, or How to Order a War: A Study of the Political Institution of Time." Journal of American Culture 17:1 (Spring), 5-10 |
| 1993 | "Kazakhs of the Tarbaghatai: Ethno-History through the Novel." The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 17:2 (Fall), 91-102 |
| 1992 | "Wusibieke Mukamu zhong de yi shou ge de yuyan yinyue ji yuyi jiegou." [Verbal, Musical and Semantic Structures in an Uzbek Maqam] Zhongguo Yinyue [Chinese Music] 1, 32-33 |
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| 2004 | “Islamic Parts of China.” A review essay in Times Literary Supplement (London), 10 December, pp. 30-31 |
| 2003 | Photos for article “The Uyghur Cause: American Attention to Islamic Causes after September 11,” Stanford Journal of International Relations, 4:2 (Fall/Winter) 64-72 |
| 1999 | Cover photo, "Decorated entry to a mosque in Urumqi," Behind the Headlines, Journal of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Summer 1999, vol. 56, no. 4. |
| 1996 | Everyday Islam. Sergei P. Poliakov. Edited with an introduction by Martha Brill Olcott. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992. In Middle East and South Asian Folklore Bulletin 13:1 (Winter 1996), 5 |
| 1995 | Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling. Margaret A. Mills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. In Journal of Folklore Research, 32:3 (September-December), 297-98 |
| 1992 | Alpamysh; Central Asian Identity under Russian Rule. H. B. Paksoy. Hartford: AACAR, 1989. In Journal of Folklore Research 29:1 (January-April), 94-95 |
| 1991 | The Presence of Myth. Leszek Kolakowski. Adam Czerniawski, transl. Chicago: University of Chicago. In Folklore Forum 24:2, 87-89 |
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2004 | "Jimjit Yatqan Qum: Music and the Politics of Public Culture on the Silk Road," Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, April 15 |
2001 | "One History True and Worthy: Turkic Origin Narratives and Identity in Central Asia from the Qaghans until Abu'l-Ghazi," Department of History, Ohio State University, March 2 |
1999 | "Attempted Traditions: The Politics of Texts during the First Four Centuries of Islamic Turkic Literature," Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University, February 8 |
1998 | "The Modernist's Apprentice: Uyghur Musicians Making National Culture," Ohio State University, November 16 |
1995 | "Chinese Cultural Politics and Minority Identity: The Debate over Re-inventing Uyghur Culture." Kenyon College, Ohio, April 12 |
1995 | "Theory Formation in Qualitative Research: Inspiration or Perspiration?" College of Education and Allied Professions, University of Toledo, April 11 |
1995 | "Ethnic Identity Processes in U.S. Culture as seen through Life on the Color Line and Children of Strangers." College of Education and Allied Professions, University of Toledo, April 4 |
1993 | "Food and Hospitality as Aesthetic Practices among the Uyghurs of Northwest China." Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, November 17 |
1987 | "Grassroots Political Organizing in American Politics." Chengdu Medical College, China, November 5 |
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| 2003 | Engaging Global Literacy: Teaching the Soviet Travels of Langston Hughes and Arthur Koestler," Conference on Composition, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, February 8 |
| 1999 | "A Fly Crushed Between Stallions: Uyghur History On The Margins Of Empire." Association for Asian Studies. Boston, March 11-14. |
1998 | "From Fragments to Wholes: Modernizing Uyghur Cultural History." Workshop on Central Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. October 8-11 |
| 1996 | "Editing Tradition: Cognitive Schemas for Constructing Ethnic Culture." American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 20-24 |
| 1996 | "The Poetics of the Theoretical Imagination." On the panel "Connoisseurs of Chaos: Theory as Genre" which I organized. American Folklore Society, Pittsburg, October 17-20 |
| 1996 | "Constructing a National Literature: The History of Uyghur Literary History." Resources for Central Asian Studies: A Workshop on Contemporary Methodologies, Columbus, Ohio, May 19-20 |
| 1996 | "Identity Formation and Public Culture: Public Representations of Ethnic Identity in Northwest China." Citizenship: Nationality, Transnationality and Education, Toledo, Ohio, April 26-27 |
| 1996 | "History and the Imaginary Institution of Identity: The Uyghur Case." Cultural Studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, April 19-20, Ann Arbor, Michigan |
| 1995 | "Identity, Performance, and Meta-Culture in Uyghur Music and Dance." American Folklore Society, Lafayette, Louisiana, October 15 |
| 1994 | "An Inner Asian Literary Tradition in its Context: Oral and Written Turkic Poetry as Sources for Social History." American Folklore Society, Milwaukee, October 19-23 |
| 1994 | "Social History of Eastern Central Asia in the 11th-14th Centuries from Literary Sources." First Annual Central Eurasian Studies, Bloomington, April 9 |
| 1993 | "Uyghur Muqam Song: A Classical Tradition in the Modern World." Folklore Institute Roundtable, Bloomington, October 5 |
| 1992 | "Qazaqs of the Tarbaghatai: Ethno-History through the Novel." Conference: The Poetics of Change in Turkish Literatures, Columbus, Ohio, May 1. Published in The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, Fall 1993 |
| 1992 | "Pizza in 30 Minutes, or How to Order a War: A Study of the Political Institution of Time." Popular Culture Association, Louisville, Kentucky, March 20. Published in Journal of American Culture, Spring 1994 |
| 1991 | "Qazaq History in Xinjiang: an Anthropological Perspective." Indiana Center on Global Change and World Peace, Indiana University, Bloomington, April 9 |
| 1991 | Roundtable presentation: "The Rhetoric of War and Peace: Folkloristic Thoughts on the Middle East." Indiana University, February 5 |
| 1991 | "The Concepts of Borders and Territory in the Conflict between Nomadic and Sedentary Polities." Indiana Center on Global Change and World Peace, Indiana University, Bloomington, January 15 |
| 1990 | "Verbal, Musical and Semantic Structures in an Uzbek Maqam." 39th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs, November 2-3 | References Available on Request
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