By Angie Gulizia
Sitting in her dimly lit office at UC Santa Barbara, graduate History student Andrea Serna points out the locations of bazaars that existed over 100 years ago in Central Asia. She speaks so fondly of the archives she works with that one can feel their aura, close enough to imagine her sifting through them, even though they are on the other side of the world.
In January 2025, Andrea Serna will embark on an eight-month research fellowship in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, sponsored by a State Department-funded grant through the American Councils for International Education’s Title VIII Combined Research & Language Training Program. She is receiving a $19,700 housing stipend, plus other expenses. Serna will conduct research for her dissertation, which explores how the newly drawn borders of the early Soviet republics, and their new national identities, affected trade networks throughout the region in the 1920s and early 1930s. She hopes to increase our knowledge of what is often what she calls a cultural “blind spot” for Americans.
UCSB History graduate student Andrea Serna in Samarqand, Uzbekistan, during her last trip to Central Asia. A prestigious fellowship from the American Councils will finance her next, extended research trip.
“When people hear the word Soviet, the first thing you think of is Russia or Ukraine,” said Serna. Most Americans, though, aren’t aware of all the other countries that exist in Central Asia. “There’s also this idea of the -Stans, and just kind of flattening the area to this monolithic culture and understanding, when really there’s so much diversity.”
In both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Serna will comb through archives with the help of local scholars, searching for documents containing information on borders, trade establishments, and national identity. She will look for administrative documents from trade activities, such as stall permits, inspector reports, and pricing regulations. She also hopes to find some “personal collections,” such as diaries, letters, merchant documents, or even images.
Since some of the documents will be in the Uzbek language, and many in Russian, Serna will take weekly language classes during her time abroad to improve her Uzbek and hone her Russian. She will also discuss her research with the Uzbek and Kazakhstani scholars she meets, and she looks forward to having conversations that will “blow the doors open” to new areas of her research.
Two main areas of interest in UCSB historian Andrea Serna’s research are the seasonal Karkura fair on the border of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and trade in the Uzgen area, which is on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. She will be based in the city of Tashkent, Uzbekistan for two months and Almaty, Kazakhstan for another two, as well as in two more cities in Uzbekistan and a collection of remote areas.
Serna may be conducting new research, but she isn’t new to the UCSB campus. During her undergraduate studies, Serna took a seminar on Central Asia taught by Adrienne Edgar, a professor in UCSB’s Department of History. Serna instantly knew that this area of study was her calling.
“I was considering going to law school…but had a change of heart, a change of mind,” said Serna. When she discovered the cultural and political world of Central Asia, “it was an immediate fascination.” In a full-circle moment, Edgar is now Serna’s advisor—and with her encouragement, Serna applied for the fellowship that will close out her Ph.D. dissertation.
The fellowship application process can be daunting, and it can be difficult to know which grant opportunities are the best fit. Serna advises grad students looking to apply for a fellowship to be open to the many options that are out there.
“Even if the fellowship is geared toward something that seems like it might be tangential to what your research objectives are, a lot of this is just knowing how to express what you do for a broader audience,” she said.
Osh bazaar complex in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. UCSB historian Andrea Serna will be searching for documents that show how different trade and commerce “departments” have interacted with each other.
After her time in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Serna plans to complete her dissertation within the year, and will then enter the job market to find work at a research university, or potentially with an NGO doing activist work in her region of study.
First, though, she is anxious to get back to combing through the history of a place she’s clearly grown to love.
“I love the archives,” said Serna. “I just feel like I’m at home.”
Angie Gulizia is a third-year Environmental Studies and Communication double major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this profile for her Digital Journalism course.