Central Asia

Jennifer Murtazashvili

Jennifer Murtazashvili is Assistant Professor of Public Administration and International Development at GSPIA. In her research she uses tools of political economy to understand sources of order and stability in the region based on a wide variety of  original data including experiments, public opinion surveys and ethnographic fieldwork. She has completed a book based on two years of research in Afghaninstan, Informal Order and the State, that explores how people govern themselves in the absence of an effective state. She is currently finishing a second book on the role property rights historically have played in building stability of the Afghan state.  In addition to her academic work, she has served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Samarkand Uzbekistan and managed democracy and governance programs for USAID in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.  She has lived for nearly a year in Russia, five years in former Soviet Central Asia, and three years in Afghanistan.

Morgan Liu

Morgan Y. Liu is a cultural anthropologist studying Muslims in former Communist countries, the impact of oil extraction on Central Asian societies, urban space, and Islamic ideas of social justice.  His broadest interests concern how Central Asians make sense of and act on structural inequalities and abuses of power.  This includes using an ethnographic lens on the developing connections between Central Asia, Turkey, and China.

He is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University.  Before a postdoc at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, he got his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Anthropology.

His 2012 book, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh, concerns how ethnic Uzbeks in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan think about political authority and post-Soviet transformations, based on research using vernacular language interviews and ethnographic fieldwork of urban social life from 1993 to 2011.

Laura Adams

Dr. Adam's research explores globalization and the nation-state in the context of the visual and performing arts, specifically in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia. Her book, The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan won the 2010 book award from the Central Eurasian Studies Society. Currently she is teaching in the Sociology Department at Georgetown University. She is also Director of the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus and Academic Advisor to the M.A. program in Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at Harvard University. Laura received her B.A. in sociology and Russian area studies from Macalester College (USA) and her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Scott Levi

Dr. Levi is Associate Professor of Central Asian history at Ohio State University. In addition to his articles and book chapters, he has authored The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002) and he has edited India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007) and co-edited (with Ron Sela) Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Sources (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).  He is currently working on his next research monograph, Central Asia on the Frontier of Empires: The Khanate of Khoqand, 1709–1876.

Ali İğmen

Dr. İğmen is Associate Professor of Central Asian History, and the Director of the Oral History Program at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). His book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan has been published by the “Central Asia in Context Series” of the University of Pittsburgh Press in July 2012, and was a finalist for the Central Eurasion Studies Society's Best Book Prize in 2013. His most recent article "Four Daughters of Tököldösh: Kyrgyz Actresses Define Soviet Modernity” appeared in 2012 (32/1) in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME). His book chapter “Kyrgyz Houses of Culture, 1920s and 1930s” appeared in Reconstructing the Soviet and Eastern European Houses House of Culture, (Habeck and Donahoe, editors,) by Berghahn Press in 2011. He received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004, and as a post-­‐doctorate visiting scholar, taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He also taught classes in Kyrgyz National University in Bishkek, Osh State University in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. A significant number of awards helped İğmen support his research on Kyrgyzstan such as Fulbright-­‐Hays, SSRC, Mellon Slavic Studies Initiative Grant and FLAS. An invitational workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Halle, Germany helped him wrap up these projects. Recently, he received the university-­‐wide Early Career Excellence Award from CSULB in 2011. He has given other book talks in University of Pittsburgh, University of Toronto, University of Washington, York University of Toronto, UCLA and Harvard. His current work is a comparative project on the often-­‐conflictingstate-­‐initiated and society supported “hero-­‐making” processes during the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Central Asia and Turkey.

John Heathershaw

Dr. Heathershaw is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter and Principal Investigator (2012-2015) of the three-year, UK-funded research project ‘Rising Powers and Conflict Management in Central Asia’.  His research concerns the conflict, security and development in Central Asia, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.  Heathershaw has held teaching and research posts at the University of Notre Dame, the American University in Central Asia, and King’s College, London.  His first book was entitled Post-Conflict Tajikistan: the politics of peacebuilding and the emergence of legitimate order (Routledge, 2009). He is on the board of the Central Eurasian Studies Society and a member of the international advisory board of the academic journal Central Asian Survey. 

Eric McGlinchey 

Eric McGlinchey is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of Graduate Studies for George Mason University’s Department of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). McGlinchey’s areas of research include comparative politics, Central Asian regime change, political Islam, and social mobilization. His current book project focuses on methods of public resistance to predatory authoritarian rule in Central Asia. McGlinchey received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003.

Amanda E. Wooden

Dr. Wooden is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania (US) and editor of “The CESS Blog” for the Central Eurasian Studies Society.  Her research focuses on environmental protests, public opinion and discourse, environmental policy and conflict, natured nationalisms, and water politics.  She earned her Ph.D. in International Relations and Public Policy at Claremont Graduate University and her B.A. in Political Science & Russian at Syracuse University.  Dr. Wooden served as Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Economic and Environmental Officer for the Osh, Kyrgyzstan field office in 2006-07.  She also taught at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), Tbilisi State University, and Georgian Technical University, and worked as Academic Coordinator for the Civic Education Project in the Caucasus.  Her publications include “Another Way of Saying Enough: Environmental Concern and Popular Mobilization in Kyrgyzstan” Post-Soviet Affairs (2013), “Water Resources, Institutions, and Intrastate Conflict” Political Geography (2010) with Ismene Gizelis, and the edited volume The Politics of Transition in Central Asia & the Caucasus: Enduring Legacies and Emerging Challenges (2009) with Christoph Stefes.

Sarah Kendzior

Sarah Kendzior is a writer for Al Jazeera English who covers politics, the economy and media. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University. Her research focuses on the authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union – in particular, Uzbekistan -- and how the internet affects political mobilization, self-expression, and trust. Her academic articles have been published in journals including American Ethnologist, The Journal of Communication, and Central Asian Survey. Foreign Policy has named Kendzior one of “the 100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events”. Visit http://www.sarahkendzior.com for more information about her work.

Noor O’Neill Borbieva 

Dr. Borbieva is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University (2007) and a B.A. from Princeton University (1996). Her research, on religious change and development in the former Soviet Union, has been published in Central Asian Studies, Slavic Review, Anthropological Quarterly, and other journals. 

Madeleine Reeves

Madeleine Reeves is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.  Her interests lie in the anthropology of politics, the state, mobility, and ethnicity. She is the co-editor of Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics (with Johan Rasanayagam and Judith Beyer), the editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia: Contested Trajectories and the author of Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. With Nina Bagdasarova she directed the three-year OSI-HESP Regional Seminar on Nationhood and Narrative in Central Asia: History, Context, Critique. 

David W. Montgomery

Dr. Montgomery is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of Program Development for CEDAR--Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion. He has conducted long-term anthropological field research in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Albania. His work focuses on the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge, expressions of everyday religious life, and the social aspects of religion and well-being in Central Asia and the Balkans.