Mustafa Tuna

 Mustafa Tuna

 

Associate Professor of Russian and Central Eurasian History at Duke University

   Departments of Slavic and Eurasian Studies & History
  Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC)


Office Hours: by appointment
  315 Languages Building
  mustafa.tuna@duke.edu

Courses / Publications / Works in Progress / Public Engagement

Mustafa Tuna (Ph.D. 2009, Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Russian and Central Eurasian History and Culture in the Departments of Slavic and Eurasian Studies & History at Duke University and is affiliated with the Duke Islamic Studies Center and the Duke Middle East Studies Center. His research focuses on social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia, especially Russia's Volga-Ural region, Central Asia, and modern Turkey, since the early-nineteenth century. He is particularly interested in identifying the often intertwined roles of Islam, social networks, state or elite interventions, infrastructural changes, and the globalization of European modernity in transforming Muslim communities. His first book, titled Imperial Russia's Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788-1917, is published by Cambridge University Press in the "Critical Perspectives on Empire Series." His second book project, titled Said Nursi's Path of Light: Faith, Practice, and Spirituality in the Works of a Twentieth-Century Scholar of Islam, aims to establish the relevance of the teachings of Said Nursi (1878-1960), a Kurdish scholar of Islam from Turkey, in negotiating the changing modern world's challenges for Islam and Muslims. He also investigates the transmission and evolution of Islamic knowledge and practices comparatively in the Turkish and Soviet contexts in preparation for a third monograph. Dr. Tuna is married and has two sons.

 

Courses 

Publications
Imperial Russia's Muslims

  • "Kazan Tatar Teachers’ School: A Globally Entangled Node in Late Imperial Russia." In Past and Present. 2019, 245(1): 153-185.

  • "The Missing Turkish Revolution: Comparing Village-Level Change and Continuity in Republican Turkey and Soviet Central Asia, 1920-1950," in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2017 (forthcoming).

  • "At the Vanguard of Contemporary Muslim Thought: Reading Said Nursi into the Islamic Tradition," in Journal of Islamic Studies. 2017 28(3): 311-40. Abstract   PDF of first draft. COPYRIGHT: The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies 2017.

  • "Pillars of the Nation: The Making of a Russian Muslim Intelligentsia and the Origins of Jadidism," Kritika, 2017 18(2): 257-81. PDF of first draft. COPYRIGHT: Kritika: Explorations in Russian & Eurasian History 2017

  • "Zapadnaia literatura istorii Tatar 18go- nachala 20go vv. [Western Literature on the History of Kazan Tatars between the Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries]." In Il'dus Zagidullin ed. Istoriia Tatar s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 6. Kazan: Institut istorii im. Sh. Mardzhani, 2013.

  • "Madrasa Reform as a Secularizing Process: A View from the Russian Empire," in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2011 53(3): 540-570. Abstract   PDF. COPYRIGHT: Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011.

  • "Rusya Muslumanlarinin Modernite ile Karsilasmasi [The Encounter of Russia's Muslims with Modernity]", in Avrasya Konusmalari: Medeniyet, Modernite, Kimlik [Eurasian Conversations: Civilization, Modernity, Identity] edited by Sevinc Alkan Ozcan (Istanbul: Kure Yayinlari, 2010): 111-42.

  • "Gaspirali Ilminskiy'e Karsi: Rusya Imparatorlugu'nun Muslumanlari Icin Iki Kimlik Projesi," in Hakan Kirimli ed. Ismail Bey Gaspirali Icin (Ankara: Kirim Dernegi Yayinlari, 2004): 241-71.

  • "Gaspirali vs. Il'minskii: Two Identity Projects for the Muslims of the Russian Empire," Nationalities Papers. 2002, 30(2): 265-289. PDF. COPYRIGHT: Association for the Study of Nationalities 2002

  • "Gorusmeler Yoluyla Soykirim" (Genocide by Negotiations), Avrasya Dosyasi: Sirbistan Bosna Hersek Ozel Sayisi, 1996, 3(4): 7-12.

 

Reviews

  • Victoria Clement. Learning to Become Turkmen: Literacy, Language, and Power, 1914-2014. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Reviewed for Slavic Review, 2019 78(2): 563-64.

  • Charles Steinwedel. Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552-1917. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). Reviewed for Kritika: Explorations in Russian & Eurasian History, 2018 19(2): 454-59.

  • Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). Reviewed for Canadian-American Slavic Studies 2017 (51).

  • Agnes Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Reviewed for International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2016 48(3): 589-90.

  • Elena I. Campbell, Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Reviewed for Nationalities Papers, online publication November 2015.

  • James H. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Reviewed for Russian Review, October 2015, 74(4):708-09.

Public Engagement