While Kurdish Studies is not new to North American academia, it has long been pushed to the margins of Middle Eastern Studies and its various subfields, including Turkish, Ottoman, Arab and Persian Studies. Following the dramatic changes that the Kurds and their question have undergone over the past decade, especially in Iraq and Syria, we have only recently seen the first attempts towards the institutionalization of Kurdish Studies in the U.S. An interdisciplinary Conference on Kurdish Politics and Societies was convened in April 2018 at Yale University, and the second one, Serbest Kurdish Studies Conference, was organized by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University in June 2018, followed by the second Serbest Kurdish Studies Conference in June 2019. While both conferences provided a welcome opportunity for scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to exchange ideas and advance the field, they also highlighted the ongoing challenges that scholars of Kurdish Studies face in the U.S. The challenges that this paper seeks to focus on is two-fold. First, there is need for an in-depth reflection within the field of Middle Eastern Studies in the U.S. on how to move beyond the ideological biases which give a priori precedence to Arab/Turkish/Persian formations, marginalizing the study of stateless groups and their experiences such as the Kurds. Second, despite becoming increasingly important for the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Kurds are not deemed too critical for American security interests in the region due to the overwhelmingly state-centric nature of U.S. foreign policy establishment. This leads to a lack of funding and institutionalized support for Kurdish Studies as an academic field, rendering the Kurds and Kurdistan marginal in scholarly knowledge production setting. This paper seeks to address these challenges with the goal of starting a productive debate among the scholars of Kurdish Studies regarding how we can build Kurdish Studies as an independent academic field of inquiry in North America.