Director
Scott Levi, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, is author of the book The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade: 1550-1900 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002). This volume examines the emergence, social organization, and decline of an Indian merchant diaspora in Central Asia and the role that the Indian merchants played in Central Asian society. His most recent volume is the co-edited, with Ron Sela, Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). This collection of fifty-five extracts from primary source documents will be used as one of the primary texts of the Institute.
Faculty
Carter Findley, Humanities Distinguished Professor in Ohio State’s Department of History, is recognized as a leader in the field of Islamic history, specifically the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. A past president of the World History Association (2000-2002), his volume, The Turks in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press) won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize for Middle East Studies in 2006.
Adeeb Khalid, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College, studies the history of the sedentary societies of Central Asia from the time of the Russian conquest of the 1860s to the present with particular interest in the transformations of culture and identity as a result of historical change. His volume, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press) won the Wayne S. Vucinish Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian and East European studies in 2008.
Nurten Kilic-Schubel, Associate Professor of History at Kenyon College, is a specialist in political culture, state formation, and Islam in medieval and early modern Central Asia. She has published multiple articles on Central Asian history in both English and Turkish, and has a forthcoming book on the political culture of Uzbek Central Asia in the sixteenth century.
Timothy May, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian History at North Georgia College and State University, specializes in the Mongol Empire and other nomadic based empires. He has authored The Mongol Art of War (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2007), and his next book, The Mongol Conquests in World History (c.1200-1350), is scheduled to be in print later this year.
Daniel Prior, Assistant Professor of History at Miami University of Ohio is widely published in Inner Asian history, nomadic culture, and oral heroic poetry. Dr. Prior’s current research relates to the history of northern Kirghiz chieftains (manaps) during the period of Russian colonial expansion into the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Ron Sela, Associate Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, is author of The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). His research focuses on the history and historiography of Islamic Central Asia in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, political and cultural self-representation in Central Asian sources, and Central Asia’s role in the history of the Islamic world.
