Nov. 8, 2010 - Dr. Mark Baker, a CSUB history professor specializing in Eastern European history, will speak about his current research in Turkey at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 17 in CSUB's Albertson Room, adjacent to the Doré Theatre. The free talk is sponsored by CSUB's History Forum, a quarterly program that brings leading scholars to campus.

Baker is currently on a two-year leave from CSUB to conduct research and teach at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. His areas of interest are the largely Muslim republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.

"This is an extremely important place for him to be," CSUB History Department chair Jeanne Harrie said of Dr. Baker's relocation to Turkey. "He is able to learn Turkish and have access to archives and to others who share his interests."

The hope is that Dr. Baker will be able to expand his courses on Russia and the former Soviet Union to include the role of Islam in the history of the former Soviet republics. The subject matter will complement the new series on Middle Eastern history being developed and taught by Dr. Mustafah Dhada at CSUB.

Baker's talk on Nov. 17 will focus specifically on the arrest of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the Soviet's representative in the Asian republics in the 1920s, for supposedly plotting an anti-Soviet revolution of the colonies.

"Dr. Baker's presentation offers a timely analysis of the interaction of Soviet Communism and Islam in the person and career of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the Bolshevik's most prominent Muslim in the early soviet period," Harrie said. "In an era in which relations with the Islamic world have become both strategically important and disturbingly tenuous, Baker's study offers a historical perspective on the nexus of Islam, Bolshevism, and the colonial independence movements."