CeLCAR is thrilled to welcome Gulnisa Nazarova as its new director! Gulnisa brings a long history of supporting the center and advancing key initiatives related to the languages and peoples of the Central Asian region. We look forward to her leadership in continuing and expanding CeLCAR’s mission in language education, research, and outreach.
Before joining Indiana University, Gulnisa Nazarova earned a graduate degree in Russian Language and Literature from Ivanovo State University in Ivanovo, Russia, and completed her PhD in Philological Sciences at the Institute of Linguistics in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
At IU, Gulnisa has been a member of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies (CEUS) since 2005 and worked with CeLCAR from 2005 to 2016. During her time at CeLCAR, she co-authored two textbooks with Georgetown University Press: Uyghur: An Elementary Textbook and Uyghur: An Intermediate Textbook. She was promoted to Teaching Professor in 2021 and in July 2021 was awarded the title of John D. Soper Teaching Professor. That same month, she was appointed Director of CeLCAR.
Gulnisa’s research interests include Uyghur language and culture, comparative lexicology of Turkic languages, etymology, ethnography, language teaching methods, and the historical Uyghur migration from Xinjiang to Soviet Central Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. She has been recognized with several honors, including membership in the Alliance of Distinguished and Titled Professors (2021) and the Trustees Teaching Award in the At-Large NTT Faculty competition (2015). (Read more here.) Since 2012, she has also served as a Uyghur language tester for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Interagency Language Roundtable Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL/ILR OPI).