Muriel Atkin, [email protected] – Professor at George Washington University.

Muriel Atkin is working on a study of the roles of Islam and nationalism in the civil war in Tajikistan, a Central Asian republic. Her other research interests include Russian policy towards Muslims at home and abroad, and Russian/Soviet relations with Iran. She teaches undergraduate courses on Russian history, Iran, and Central Asia.

Henry E. Hale, [email protected] – Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) at George Washington University.

He has spent extensive time conducting field research in the countries of post-Soviet Eurasia and works primarily on issues related to identity politics, political regimes, and public opinion. His work has won two prizes from the American Political Science Association, and he is the author of the books Patronal Politics (2015), Foundations of Ethnic Politics (2008), and Why Not Parties in Russia (2006), all with Cambridge University Press.

Prior to joining GW, he taught at Indiana University (2000-2005), the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia (1999), and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1997-98). He is also chair of the editorial board of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization.

Benjamin Hopkins, [email protected] – Director, Sigur Center for Asian Studies; Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

Professor Hopkins is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of Afghanistan and British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books on the region, including The Making of Modern Afghanistan, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, and Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. His new book, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, presents a global history of how the limits of today’s state-based political order were organized in the late nineteenth century, with lasting effects to the present day. He is currently working on A Concise History of Afghanistan for Cambridge University Press, as well as a manuscript about the continuing war in Afghanistan provisionally entitled, The War that Destroyed America.

Professor Hopkins’ research has been funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, the Nuffield Foundation (UK), the British Academy, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, as well as the Leverhulme Trust. He has received fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the National University of Singapore, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC. Writing for the public, Professor Hopkins has been featured in The New York Times, The National Interest, and the BBC. He regularly teaches courses on South Asian history, the geopolitics of South and Central Asia, as well as World history and the legacies of violence and memory in Asia. Professor Hopkins has directed the Sigur Center for Asian Studies since 2016.

Sebastien Peyrouse, [email protected] – Research Professor at George Washington University’s Central Asia Program in the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Sebastien Peyrouse, PhD, is a research professor at the Central Asia Program in the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University). He is also a EUCAM (Europe-Central Asia Monitoring) associate researcher and member of Crude Accountability’s board of directors. He worked five years in Central Asia, at the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1998-2000, 2002-2005), and was Research Fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C. (October 2006-June 2007), and at the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute (SAIS, Johns Hopkins University (2007-2010). His main areas of expertise are political systems in Central Asia, economic and social issues, Islam and religious minorities, and Central Asia’s geopolitical positioning toward China, India and South Asia. He has authored or co-authored several books on Central Asia and published many articles, including in Europe Asia Studies; Nationalities Papers; China Perspectives; Religion, State & Society; and Journal of Church and State.

Sean Roberts, [email protected] – Associate Professor in the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies MA program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

Roberts is an anthropologist with regional expertise in Central Asia, where he also has also done extensive applied development work on issues related to civil society, governance, and human rights. Much of his academic work has focused on the Uyghur people in the People’s Republic of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as well as in Central Asia and Turkey. His first book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, September 2020) draws on his field research and in-depth interviews with Uyghurs. Roberts also writes on issues related to politics and development in the broader Central Asian region. He frequently comments for media outlets on current events both in Central Asia and in the Uyghur region of China. Roberts earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. @RobertsReport

Peter Rollberg, [email protected] – Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Research Initiatives at George Washington University.

Peter Rollberg joined the George Washington University in 1991. He grew up in Halberstadt, Germany, and in Moscow. In 1988, he earned his Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the University of Leipzig. In 1990-1991, he taught at Duke University. Among his English, German, and Russian publications are articles on Aleksandr Pushkin, Feodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasilii Grossman, Mikhail Prishvin, Vasilii Belov, Vladimir Makanin, and Anatolii Kim. He also wrote about aspects of Russian and German cinema and media and was the editor of The Modern Encyclopedia of East Slavic, Baltic, and Eurasian Literatures (Academic International Press, 1996). In 1997, he published a Festschrift in honor of Charles Moser, And Meaning for a Life Entire (Slavica). He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2008), the second, enlarged edition of which was published in 2016 (Rowman and Littlefield). In 2014, he edited “Media in Eurasia” – a special issue of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post- Soviet Democratization, and in 2015, with Marlène Laruelle, “The Media Landscape in Central Asia,” in the same journal. In 2018, Rollberg published Mass Media in the Post-Soviet World (ibidem/Columbia University Press, coedited with Marlene Laruelle). Peter Rollberg was director of the GWU Honors Program in 2001-2003, director of the GWU Film Studies Program in 2000-2010, Chair of the German and Slavic Department in 1999- 2001, and Chair of the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2006-2009. In 2010-2019, Rollberg was the director of the M.A. Program in European and Eurasian Studies. In 2019, he was appointed Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Research Initiatives in the Elliott School of International Affairs. In 2012-2019, Rollberg served as Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. He won a Bender Teaching Award in 1999 and the Trachtenberg Teaching Award in 2001.

Eric Schluessel, [email protected] – Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University.

Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Schluessel’s current project, Exiled Gods, delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire.

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel is also completing a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang. Ongoing research builds off of this and other manuscript, documentary, and memoir sources to reconstruct an economic history of Xinjiang from below.

Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year as a Mellow Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Snezhana Atanova, [email protected] – Research Fellow at IVRAN (Moscow) and a PhD candidate at INALCO ( Paris).

Snezhana’s thesis focuses on material culture and national identity in Central Asia. She was a curator of the festival “Arts and Crafts from Central Asia” (organized during the Central Eurasian Studies Society international conference) in Washington in 2019. Snezhana is also the recipient of Central Asian and Azerbaijan Fellowship (CAAFP) in 2019, an IFEAC fellowship in 2018 and a Carnegie fellowship in 2017. She earned a Master’s in History from INALCO (Paris), a Master’s in International Communication from the University of Strasbourg, and BA degree from the Turkmen State University named after Magtymgyly (Ashkhabad).

Alexander Cooley, [email protected] – Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute (2016-present).

Cooley’s research examines how external actors—including emerging powers, international organizations, multinational companies, NGOs, and Western enablers of grand corruption—have influenced the development, governance and sovereignty of the former Soviet states, with a focus on Central Asia and the Caucasus. He is the author and/or editor of seven academic books including, Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (Yale University Press 2017), co-authored with John Heathershaw, and most recently, Exit from Hegemony: the Unravelling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-authored with Daniel Nexon. In addition to his academic research, Cooley serves on several international advisory boards engaged with the region and has testified for the United States Congress and Helsinki Commission. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs and his research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, among others. Cooley earned both his MA and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Artemy M. Kalinovsky, [email protected] – Professor of Integrative Knowledge in Russia, Soviet, and Post-Soviet studies at Temple University.

Artemy earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he taught at the University of Amsterdam. His interests include Soviet and Russian Foreign Policy, modern Central Asia, and the history of development and welfare. He is an editor of the Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era collection, which is sponsored by the Central Asia Program.

Artemy is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011), and, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), which won the Davis Center and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is also the editor or co-editor of a number of edited volumes dealing with Soviet history, the Cold War, and globalization, including Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies in the Cold War era, with Michael Kemper (Routledge, 2015) and Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, with Steffi Marung and James Mark (Indiana University Press, 2020). Artemy was recently the recipient of a European Research Council Consolidator grant for a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times.

Liliya Karimova, [email protected] – Assistant Professor, Northern Virginia Community College.

Liliya received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Prior to joining NVCC, she taught at George Washington University’ Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and coordinated the Central Asia Program at Elliott School of International Affairs. She has held research fellowships at the Kennan Institute (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), Kluge Center (the Library of Congress), and IERES (GWU). Liliya’s research focuses on Islam, identity, discourse, gender, and social change in Tatarstan, Russia. Her research appeared in The Journal of Intercultural Communication Research; Nova Religio: the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions; Central Asian Survey; Central Asian Affairs; Anthropology and Archaeology of Eurasia; and Religion, State, and Society.

Nargis Kassenova, [email protected] – Senior Fellow, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

Nargis Kassenova is a Senior Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University, and Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations and Regional Studies of KIMEP University. Her areas of research include Central Asian politics and security, Eurasian geopolitics, Kazakhstan’s foreign policy, religion and politics in Central Asia, and history of state-building in Central Asia.

Erica Marat, [email protected] – Associate Professor and Chair of the Regional and Analytical Studies Department at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA) in the National Defense University. She has previously directed the Homeland Defense Fellowship Program at CISA.

Dr. Marat’s research focuses on violence, mobilization and security institutions in Eurasia, India, and Mexico. She has authored three books, including most recently The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press 2018). Her articles appeared in Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Eurasanet, and Open Democracy.

Dr. Marat is currently focused on completing a book on mobilization against violence in India and Mexico. She is also engaged in a research project on China’s and Russia’s provision of public services for illiberal governances in 15 countries across five continents. The projects are funded by the Minerva DECUR grant.

At CISA, Dr. Marat teaches courses on policy analysis and critical thinking, politics and security in Eurasia, and terrorism & crime. Before joining NDU, Dr. Marat was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has also worked as an editor at the Russian Service at Voice of America and as a research fellow at the Central Asian – South Caucasus Institute at the John Hopkins University and Uppsala University.

Eric McGlinchey, [email protected] – Associate Professor of Politics and Government at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

McGlinchey received his PhD from Princeton University and is the author of Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia (2011). He is Principal Investigator for the study, Russian, Chinese, Militant, and Ideologically Extremist Messaging Effects on United States Favorability Perceptions in Central Asia (Minerva Research Initiative, January 2017 – **December 2019**). Grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the International Research & Exchanges Board, the Social Science Research Council, and the US Department of State have also funded his research. McGlinchey has published widely in academic journals and the popular press and has contributed to multiple US government studies, including his 2007 USAID funded Study of Political Party Assistance in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as well as three 2013 USAID funded risk assessments on Violent Extremism and Insurgency in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia.

Marintha Miles, [email protected] – PhD Candidate, George Mason University; Associate of the Central Asia Program.

Marintha Miles is a PhD candidate at George Mason University with a research focus on media and social media in Tajikistan as a social and civic activism. Her additional research focuses on women and families in Tajikistan, health care, and religion within the political economy. She previously earned a B.A. from Cal State East Bay in International Studies with an emphasis on Migration. Her senior thesis explored the online political activism of the Tajik diaspora in Russia. After undertaking ethnographic research in Tajikistan, she received an M.A. in Anthropology from The George Washington (GWU).

Ms. Miles’ articles have been published in Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Central Asia Program Policy Briefs, and in Central Asian Affairs. She has been an invited speaker work at the University of Indiana Bloomington, New York University, The George Washington University Elliot School of International Relations, Harvard University, and government organizations. She previously spearheaded the GWU Gelman Library Global Resource Center’s web-archiving of digital material from across Central Asia. She was previously Deputy Director and coordinator of the Central Asia Program.

Noah Tucker, [email protected] – Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center and program associate at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs Central Asia Program.

Noah was previously Executive Editor for the Not in Our Name film and television series, the first region-wide project designed to prevent violent extremism in Central Asia through community dialogues in areas most directly affected by recruiting to Syria. He has worked as a consultant on multiple collaborative projects for government, academic and international organizations to identify the way social and religious groups affect political and security outcomes in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Recent publications include “Terrorism without a God: Reconsidering Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization Models in Central Asia” (GWU Central Asia Program September 2019). Noah has worked on Central Asian issues since 2002—specializing in religion, national identity, ethnic conflict and social media—and received an MA from Harvard in Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies in 2008. He has spent some six years living and working in in the region, primarily in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and speaks Russian and Uzbek. Noah most recently conducted fieldwork on reintegration efforts for returnees from the Syrian conflict in Uzbekistan in March-May 2020.

Aitolkyn Kourmanova – Senior Editor of Central Asian Analytical Network (CAAN),  Voices on Central Asia and UZ Analytics. She is an expert on economic policy in Central Asia, and authored several studies on regional economic cooperation, trade, commodity and financial markets. She also has an extensive media management experience. She has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and Executive MBA from HEC Paris. At Central Asia Program, she manages online content, media, and communications.

Jay Madden – Publications and Events Associate at the Central Asia Program. Jay is a senior undergraduate student at the Elliott School of International Affairs. He is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in international affairs with a concentration in the Middle East and minors in Spanish and Arabic languages. Prior to joining the Central Asia Program, Jay was a Junior Fellow at the Middle East Policy Council.