Since its original formation in 1943 as a language-training program for the U.S. military, the department has become the sole independent degree-granting academic unit staffed with its own faculty dedicated to Central Eurasia in the country.

CEUS is home to many notable scholars of Central Eurasian studies, past and present, including Christopher Beckwith, Yuri Bregel, Jamsheed Choksy, Devin Deweese, William Fierman, György Kara, Nazif Shahrani, Denis Sinor, and Elliot Sperling.

The department teaches many less commonly taught languages, including Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kurdish, Pashto, Tajik, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek.

It is part of the National Resource Center program, and is funded by a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education, through which it receives approximately $230,000 a year.

It scope includes the civilizations of Central Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet, together with neighboring areas and peoples that in certain periods formed cultural, political, or ethnolinguistic unities with these regions.

The SRIFIAS has had five directors, all members of the faculty of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University: Denis Sinor (1967–1981), Stephen Halkovic (1982–1985), Yuri Bregel (1986–1997), Devin DeWeese (1997–2007), and Edward Lazzerini (since 2007).