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News Release

Last modified: Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Uzbekistan's U.S. ambassador visiting IU Bloomington on Monday

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nov. 20, 2012

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Ilhom Tuychievich Nematov, the Republic of Uzbekistan's ambassador to the United States, will visit Indiana University Bloomington on Monday, Nov. 26, and review its extensive educational and research offerings about the Central Asian nation.

Nematov will wrap up his visit with a public presentation from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the President's Room of the University Club, located in the Indiana Memorial Union, 900 E. Seventh St.

The program will include photo and video exhibits, a short talk by the ambassador, and dance and music performances. Muparrakh Musaeva, a Fulbright language-teaching assistant at IU from the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, will perform a traditional dance. Gulrukh Shakirova, a graduate student in the IU Jacobs School of Music, also will perform on piano. The program will be followed by a reception with Uzbek food.

The Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center and the IU Uzbek Student and Scholar Association are sponsors of the event.

Nematov also will tour the Bloomington campus and meet with students who are learning the Uzbek language as well as with faculty in IU's Department of Central Eurasian Studies and the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

The center is one of IU's 11 federally funded Title VI language and resource centers, and both are part of IU's new School of Global and International Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"Uzbekistan, with its historic cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, has long been a major stop on the historic Silk Road and a center of Asian literature, philosophy, science, religion, music and culture," said Christopher P. Atwood, chair of Central Eurasian Studies. "The word 'algorithm' comes from 'al-Khorazmi,' meaning 'the Khorazmian.' This was the nickname of the first inventor of algorithms and was taken from the region in Uzbekistan, Khorazm, where he was born.

"IU has the taught Uzbek since 1965, making it the oldest continuous program in Uzbek pedagogy in North America. It is great to see relations between Uzbekistan and American academic institutions becoming warmer, and we hope that this will lead to a more active relation between students and scholars in Uzbekistan and Indiana."

IU has a long history of teaching and research on the Uzbek language. The Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center hosts Fulbright scholars, exchange scholars and foreign language teaching assistants each year. It also supports many projects and initiatives.

The Department of Central Eurasian Studies offers all levels of Uzbek language courses, and the federally funded Turkish Flagship Program is developing unique Uzbek language courses for students with Turkic Language background.

The Center for Turkic and Iranian Lexicography and Dialectology developed the Uzbek-English Dictionary Project. The Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region published the leading textbook on Uzbek. IU's Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European and Central Asian languages offers two levels of Uzbek each year.

The Uzbek Student and Scholar Association was formed last year, and its members actively participate in campus events.

Nematov has been his country's ambassador to the United States since February 2010. He previously served as Uzbekistan's ambassador to the Russian Federation in 2008-10 and to India in 1997-99. He also served as first deputy minister of foreign affairs, as a consultant to the Uzbek president and in a variety of other diplomatic assignments.

In 1992, he graduated with honors from the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

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