CRRC, ARISC and American Councils are pleased to announce the 14th session of the Spring/Summer 2025 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
This week’s session will be in hybrid format in-person at the CRRC Georgia office and online via Zoom.
“The ELARC Archive Project: Opening New Resources in Azerbaijani Ethnomusicology”
Anna Oldfield, Coastal Carolina University
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 at 18:30 Tbilisi time (10:30 EDT)
This presentation will give highlights on the ELARC Amina Eldarova Archive Project, which is a Collaborative Heritage Management project between Anna Oldfield and Kamila Dadash-zade of the Azerbaijan National Conservatory. The project has been to catalog, digitize, and make a public website for the archives of Azerbaijani scholar Amina Eldarova (1921-2008). Eldarova was Azerbaijan’s first ethnomusicologist and spent her career from the 1930s to the 1990s researching the ashiq genre, a living epic tradition that has been practiced in the South Caucasus for hundreds of years. Eldarova passed away in 2008, leaving a professional archive of field notebooks, photographs, unpublished writings and drafts, correspondence, radio and conference presentations, and photographs. This project worked to archive and create an indexed list of contents, and is in process of creating websites to give access to scholars. This presentation will discuss highlights of the archive as well as the goals and outcomes of the project.
Anna Oldfield is a Professor at Coastal Carolina University, where she teaches World Literatures and Cultures. Her primary research focuses on the epic arts of Turkic cultures, with a special emphasis on Azerbaijani ashiq bards. Her work is interdisciplinary, bridging literary and cultural studies with ethnomusicology. She has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and has been active in cultural exchange projects with organizations such as Smithsonian Folkways, the British Library, and the Kazakh Academy of Arts. Her recent publications have examined Azerbaijani women musicians in the diaspora, the 19th-century figure Asiq Peri, and comparative studies of ashiq bards in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Iran.
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) Georgia, the American Councils for International Education, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well or citing anything expressed therein in the press without explicit permission. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC or of American Councils.
