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Interviews with scholars of Central Asia about their new books.
Law. How does the state form and use it? How do people use and shape it? How does law shape culture? How does the practice of law change over time in …
How was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Sovie…
In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in …
Through stunning images, maps and insightful commentary, Life & Legacy: A Window into Jewish Life Across the Islamic World (U Groningen Press, 2023) o…
The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These…
Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher…
In this interview we deep dive into the historiographical issues of the texts in The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (Hackett, 2021), edited…
Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collap…
The Secret History of the Mongols is one of the literary wonders of the world. Writing in the thirteenth century, the Secret Historian - whose identit…
Antony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-buil…
By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Yiannis Kokosalakis' book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the So…
In the second half of the 19th century, both professional and amateur archaeologists, surveyors, and explorers of the “periphery” of the Russian Empi…
In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas M…
In the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make th…
Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrat…
The world as seen by a Qur’an specialist in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov's book Muslim Subjectivity in S…
In his debut short story collection, Nomad, Nomad (Bound to Brew, 2021), Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats looking for a sense of h…
Between 1956 and 1960, leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a collectivization campaign to change the way in which Mongolians intera…
Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the …
The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projecti…