Mission
The American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) is a non-profit educational organization that supports the development of Mongolian Studies and academic exchanges with Inner Asia.
A Brief History of Mongolian Studies in the US
- Mongolian studies is an interdisciplinary field of scholarly inquiry concerning Mongolian language, Mongolian history, and Mongolian culture. Scholars who work in the field of Mongolian studies are often referred to as Mongolists.
- Isaac Jacob Schmidt is generally regarded as the “founder” of Mongolian studies as an academic discipline. Schmidt, a Moravian (historical county in the Czech Republic) from Amsterdam and emigre to Russia, began his exposure to the Mongolic languages when he was posted to the Kalmyks in the late 18th century. He translated the Gospel of Matthew into the Kalmyk language.
- Mongolian Studies took off rapidly in the early 20th century, thanks to eminent scholars such as Jeremiah Curtin, Berthold Laufer, and Roy Chapman Andrews. The University of California, Berkeley offered the first Mongolian language course in the U.S. in 1936, taught by Ferdinand Lessing. Harvard University also had some scholars who worked in the field, such as Francis Woodman Cleaves and Antoine Mostaert; Joseph Fletcher was one of Cleaves’ students.
- However, U.S. institutions for Mongolian studies were not founded until after World War II with the arrival of the post-war refugees from communism, which included Diluwa Khutugtu Jamsrangjab of Mongolia, John Gombojab Hangin of Inner Mongolia, and former Soviet Academy of Sciences member Nicholas Poppe.
- Poppe taught at the Far Eastern and Russian Institute at University of Washington; John Krueger was one of his students there. Denis Sinor of Hungary, who taught at the University of Cambridge after the war, arrived in the U.S. in 1962 and founded the Department of Ural and Altaic Studies at Indiana University (now known as the Department of Central Eurasian Studies), and later recruited Krueger and Hangin to join the department.