BLOOMINGTON – The Indiana University Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies will receive $1.5 million from the Tang Research Foundation to endow a professorship in Silk Road studies.
The Department of Central Eurasian Studies is the world’s leading center of academic expertise on Central Eurasia and the United States’ only independent degree-granting academic unit staffed with its own faculty dedicated to the region.
“The Eurasian heartland has played a pivotal role in the development of both Europe and Asia,” said former Ambassador Lee Feinstein, the Hamilton Lugar School’s founding dean. “The Roger E. Covey Professorship in Silk Road Studies will help us deepen scholarship and understanding of the cultures, languages, histories, politics, trade, and economies extending from Northern Europe to East Asia and from Lapland and Siberia to the Persian Gulf and the Himalayas.”
Established in the school’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies, the professorship honors the foundation’s former president, the late Roger E. Covey.
The faculty member holding this endowed professorship would assume a leadership role in scholarly and policy communities as the leading authority on Silk Road studies and would draw upon the vast expertise already well-established for many decades in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies.
