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TATAR IN TEMPE, ARIZONA

Greetings! Isenmesez!

Click on the following LIST OF TATAR RESOURCES to find out about Tatar on the World Wide Web.

Thanks in part to funding provided by the Social Science Research Council, Arizona State University is offering intensive first-year Tatar instruction in the summer of 2001 from 4 June to 27 July. This offering is tuition-free, and provides ten credit hours of fully transferable undergraduate language credit.  We are also offering intermediate Tatar during the same period for six credit hours.

This eight-week course is designed to give the students the opportunity to learn the language and become familiar with the culture of the Tatars, a Turkic people living in Tatarstan, Siberia and Central Asia. Tatars played an important role in the national awakening of the Islamic peoples in Russia both before and after the 1917 revolutions; today Tatarstan enjoys a unique position in the Russian Federation as the only internal republic officially recognized as "sovereign."

Tatar is also linguistically close to other Turkic languages. A solid knowledge of Tatar will provide a good foundation for the study of other Turkic languages of the former USSR, such as Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh.

The Tatar course will entail twenty five hours of classroom and laboratory instruction each week. The primary teacher will be Agnes Kefeli, a former student of Alexandre Bennigsen, the noted expert on Soviet Islam.

In addition to formal classroom hours, the course includes an extracurricular program to expose students to Tatar culture, including Tatar cinema and animation, Tatar music, and Tatar food. If there is sufficient interest on the part of the students, we will produce a short play.

For information and applications, please contact

Carol Withers, Russian and East European Studies Consortium
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2601
Telephone: (480) 965-4188; Fax: (480) 965-0310
E-mail: Carol.Withers@ASU.edu

ASU TATAR PROGRAM AT KAZAN STATE UNIVERSITY

ASU has recently concluded an agreement with Kazan State University, the center of Tatar culture, which will allow ASU students to study Tatar in Kazan, Tatarstan, for a semester or academic year.

For more information, contact

Carol Withers, Russian and East European Studies Consortium
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2601
Telephone: (480) 965-4188; Fax: (480) 965-0310
E-mail: Carol.Withers@ASU.edu

Tatar broadcasts are available from Radio Liberty.  For more information about Tatar courses at ASU or the ASU program in Kazan, send a message to Agnès Kefeli.  Last updated on 24 November 2000. This page has been accessed  times.