PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 23, No. 18, April 22, 2004

Center receives funding and new name

By Melissa Mitchell, News Bureau Staff Writer
217-333-5491, melissa@illinois.edu

The campus's oldest area studies center -- the Russian and East European Center -- is among those that received a three-year Comprehensive National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education this year.

However, new funding isn't the only recent addition to the center. Effective last month, the center has added an extra "E" to its name, becoming the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center.

"In part, the reason for the change is simple and practical," history professor Mark Steinberg, the center's director, wrote in a recent newsletter. "Since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago, the term Russia can no longer -- if it ever could -- reasonably stand for all the former Soviet states. As a result, throughout the profession, it has now become common to use the term Eurasia to refer to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, especially in the Caucases and Central Asia."

Steinberg said the term Eurasia also has been used more broadly to refer to parts of Central Asia that were never part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, such as Afghanistan, and countries such as Turkey, whose geographical, political and cultural boundaries have historically intersected with Europe and Asia.

Considered to be a national leader in the dissemination of knowledge about Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the center has been a fixture on the UI campus since 1959, according to Steinberg. And as "one of the oldest and leading centers of this kind in the country," the UI center has long been a model for other such centers formed elsewhere, he said.

"It was founded in response to a new initiative in the late 1950s, during the Cold War, when it was determined that we needed broad and deep knowledge of those countries and their languages and culture. When the Cold War ended, this goal remained, if for less political reasons, and the means expanded to include a wider range of lectures, conferences, study groups and performances."

Today, scholars from throughout the world use the center's resources, and participate in its programs, the most notable of which may be its annual Summer Research Laboratory. Other programs, such as a study trip planned this summer for 14 K-12 teachers from across the United States, funded by a Fulbright Hays Group Projects Abroad Grant, are aimed at strengthening international knowledge among educators and the public.

Steinberg called NRC funding "a mark of success" for centers that receive it. Such funding, he said, is "phenomenally important because most of what we do is support faculty and staff salaries." Without the grant, he added, "we could not bring in lecturers, we could not organize conferences and could not build the kind of media library we have, which people from all over the country use." And like other campus centers, REEEC also uses grant funds to support several Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships.

For a more detailed explanation of the rationale behind the center's name change, including short essays by center faculty members, see REEEC's Fall 2003 newsletter.

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