December 12, 2006 Author Marianne Kamp Discusses Her Book on Uzbek Women on Jan. 11

Author Marianne Kamp will explore the lives of Uzbek women before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in a lecture next month at the Library of Congress.

Kamp will talk about her new book, “The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism,” at noon on Thursday, Jan. 11, in Room 119 in the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington D.C.

The event, sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

In her book, Kamp draws on oral histories and writings to reexamine the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual liberation. Her examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early 20th century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

Kamp is assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate, energize and distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policy-makers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.