- Shirin Akiner
Shirin Akiner is a lecturer in Central Asian Studies at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She has produced many works, particularly on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and is a Member of Editorial and Advisory Board of "Journal of Central Asian and Caucasian Studies", published by the U.S.A.K.. In 2005 she became involved in a controversy when human rights groups, non-governmental organizations and former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, …
- Richard Nelson Frye
Richard Nelson Frye (c. 1920) is an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian Studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His professional areas of interest are Iranian philology, and the history of Iran and Central Asia before 1000 CE. Born in Birmingham, Alabama to a family of immigrants from Sweden, "Freij" has four children, his second marriage being to an Assyrian scholar, Dr. Eden Naby, …
- Olivier Roy
Olivier Roy (born 1949) is a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the "Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (IEP)". Since 1984, he has acted as a consultant to the French Foreign Ministry. In 1988, Roy served as a United Nations Office for Coordinating Relief in Afghanistan (UNOCA) consultant.
- Yuri Bregel
Yuri Bregel was born in the U.S.S.R., and studied in the Oriental Faculty of the University of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad State University). This was the same institution which produced the great Vasily Bartold, and Bregel proved a more than worthy successor to this tradition of rigorous scholarship in the Islamic History of Central Asia. In 1974 he defected to the United States, …
- Daniel Waugh
Daniel C. Waugh is a historian based at the University of Washington. He did his undergraduate work at Yale University, and in 1963 graduated with a B.A. in Physics. In 1965, he finished his Master's on the "Regional Studies of the Soviet Union" at Harvard University, and seven years later he completed his Ph.D. at the same institution. The same year, 1972, he began his employment at the University of Washington, and has remained there ever since.
- Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rashid (b. 1948 in Rawalpindi) is a Pakistani journalist and best-selling author. Rashid attended Malvern College, England, Government College Lahore, and Cambridge University. He serves as the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the "Far Eastern Economic Review" and the "Daily Telegraph". He also writes for the "Wall Street Journal", "The Nation", and academic journals.
- Zeki Velidi Togan
Zeki Velidi Togan village of Sterlitamak uyezd, today Bashkortostan. After his emigration to Turkey, his name was turkicized as "Zeki Velidi Togan" (in the Arabic script used by both languages - at that time there was no difference between the two). From 1912-1915 Velidi taught in the madrassa (school) in Kazan (Qasímiä), and from 1915 to 1917 he was a member of bureau, supporting Muslim deputies at the State Duma. In 1917 he was elected to Millät Mäclese, …
- Alexandre Bennigsen
Alexandre Bennigsen (20 March 1913, St Petersburg - 3 June 1988) was a scholar of Islam in the Soviet Union. Bennigsen was born in St Petersburg in 1913. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family settled in Paris in 1924. He received education at the Ecole des Langues Orientales. He taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (en Sciences Sociales) and became the chair of history of non-Arab Islam.
- Paul Pelliot
Paul Pelliot was a French sinologist and explorer of Central Asia. A pupil of Sylvain Lévi, Pelliot conducted only one archaeological expedition into Central Asia. Pelliot worked at École Française d'Extrême Orient in Hanoi, from where he was dispatched in 1900 to Beijing to search for Chinese books for the Ecole's library. While there, he was caught up in the Boxer Rebellion and trapped in the siege of foreign legations.
- Svat Soucek
Dr. Svat Soucek is a compiler and author of works in relation to Central Asia, and Central Asian studies and works in the oriental division of the New York Public Library. His works include "Turkish Mapmaking After Columbus" and "A history of Inner Asia".
- Iraj Bashiri
Iraj Bashiri is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, USA and one of the leading scholars in the fields of Central Asian Studies and Iranian Studies. Fluent in English, Persian, Tajik, and several Turkic languages, Bashiri has been able to study and translate works otherwise inaccessible to the mostly Russian-speaking Central Asian studies community.
- Peter Hopkirk
Peter Hopkirk, born December 15 1930, in Nottingham, England is a British journalist and author. He worked for ITV news as a reporter and The Times newspaper as a foreign affairs specialist and latterly as chief reporter. His books include: *Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980) ISBN 0-87023-435-8 *Trespassers on the Roof of the World, J. Murray, 1982. *Setting the East Ablaze, 1984.
- Edward A. Allworth
Edward A. Allworth is an American historian who is Emeritus Professor of Turco-Soviet Studies at Columbia University.
- Gunnar Jarring
Gunnar Jarring was a Swedish Turkologist and diplomat. Jarring studied at Lund University, and earned his PhD in 1933 with his dissertation "Studien zu einer osttürkischen Lautlehre". After teaching Turkic languages at the University for the rest of the 1930s, he worked for the Swedish foreign service as attaché at their embassy in Ankara in 1940. He later held diplomatic positions in Teheran, Baghdad, and Addis Ababa, …
- Francis Younghusband
Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (31 May, 1863 - 31 July, 1942) was a British Army officer, explorer, and spiritualist. He is remembered chiefly for his travels in the Far East and Central Asia and his writings on the subject.
- Baymirza Hayit
Baymirza Hayit, also spelled Boymirza Hayit, was a historian and orientalist who specialized in the history of Turkestan and Central Asia.
- Marc Aurel Stein
Sir Marc Aurel Stein, Stein Márk Aurél in Hungarian. In 1901 Stein was responsible for exposing forgeries of Islam Akhun. During his expedition of 1906-1908 while surveying in the Kunlun mountain range in western China, Stein suffered frostbite and lost several toes on his right foot. When he was resting from his extended journeys into Central Asia, …
- Geoffrey Wheeler
Geoffrey Wheeler (1897-1990) was a preeminent historian of Central Asia and an officer in the British military.
- Robert D. McChesney
Robert D. McChesney is a scholar of the social and cultural history of Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan.
- Albert Von Le Coq
Albert von Le Coq (1860 - 1930) was a German archaeologist and explorer of Central Asia. He was heir to a sizable fortune derived from breweries and wineries scattered throughout Central and Eastern Europe, thus allowing him the luxury of travel and study at the Berlin Ethnological Museum. Serving as assistant to the head of the Museum, Professor Grunwedel, Le Coq helped plan and organize expeditions into the regions of western Asia, specifically areas near the Silk Road.
- Dilip Hiro
Dilip Hiro (born Larkana) is a playwright and analyst specializing in Islamic countries, ranging from Iraq and Lebanon to the Central Asian republics. He was born to Hindu parents in British India, who migrated to independent India after partition in 1947. He currently lives in London. Hiro is the author of twenty-eight titles, including his most recent book "Iran Today" (2006) and "The Timeline History of India" (2006).
- Mustafa Chokaev
Mustafa Chokaev (also spelled Mustafa Chokayev, Çokay, Cokay, Shokay, and Shokai; Kazakh: "Мұстафа Шоқайұлы", Russian: "Мустафа Шокай", 1890-1941), …
- Zeyno Baran
Zeyno Baran is the Director of the Center for Eurasian Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.. From January 2003 until joining the Hudson Institute in April 2006, she worked as the Director of International Security and Energy Programs for the The Nixon Center. Baran also worked as the Director of the Caucasus Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 1999 until December 2002.
- Nikolai Przhevalsky
Nikolai Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky, also spelled Przewalski and Prjevalsky, was a Russian geographer and explorer of Central and Eastern Asia. Although he never reached his final goal, Lhasa in Tibet, he discovered the only extant species of wild horse and added immensely to the store of European knowledge on Central Asia. Przhevalsky was born in Smolensk into a noble Belarusian family, and studied there and at the military academy in St.
- Vasily Bartold
Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold (also known as Wilhelm Barthold; in Saint Petersburg - 19 August 1930 in Leningrad) was a Russian and Soviet historian who succeeded Wilhelm Radloff as the greatest authority in the field of Turcology. His contributions to the understanding of the medieval culture of Central Asia are particularly valuable, earning him the moniker of the "Gibbon of Turkestan".
- Peter Benjamin Golden
Peter Benjamin Golden (born 1941) is Professor of History at Rutgers University.<br /> He earned his bachelors degree from CUNY Queens College in 1963 and his PhD in History from Columbia University in 1970.<br /> He is the author of a wide array of books, articles and other written works on Turkic and Central Asian Studies.
- Boris Marshak
Boris Ilich Marshak was an archeologist who spent more than fifty years excavating the Sogdian ruins at Panjakent, Tajikistan.
- René Grousset
René Grousset was a French historian specializing in Asiatic and Oriental history.
- Hélène Carrère D'Encausse
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse is the permanent secretary of the Académie Française (elected in 1990). Her birth name is Hélène Zourabichvili and she is a historian who specializes in Russian history. She is a graduate of the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as the "Sciences Po"). Her son, Emmanuel Carrère (born 1957), is an author, screenwriter and director.
- Vladimir Obruchev
Vladimir Afanasyevich Obruchev (village of Klepenino, now in Rzhevsky District, Tver Oblast - June 19, 1956, Moscow) was a Russian geologist, geographer, explorer, academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1929), Hero of Socialist Labor (1945), and honorary president of the Soviet Geographical Society (since 1947). As one of the pioneers of Russian science fiction, …
- Nikolai Petrovsky
Nikolai Petrovsky was the Russian consul-general in Kashgar from 1882 until 1902. Petrovsky's main adversary during his time in Central Asia was George McCartney, his English counterpart. The competition between their two countries for influence in Central Asia is known as the Great Game. Between 1899 and June of 1902 the two did not speak to each other.
- Hasan Bülent Paksoy
Hasan Bulent Paksoy is a Turkish historian (b. 1948 in Ödemiş) who earned his doctoral degree at the St. Antony's College of the Oxford University in England with a grant from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom. The WorldCat (of OCLC) lists 16 entries under his name. Most of them are available online. Paksoy has also worked in History departments at Ohio State University, Franklin University, …
- Wang Yuanlu
Wang Yuanlu (c.a. 1849 - 1931) was a Taoist priest acting as an abbot of the caves in Dunhuang at the beginning of the 20th century. He discovered ancient Buddhist scriptures in a temple there, and, failing to appreciate their cultural value, sold them to various visitors from Europe. The first was Sir Aurel Stein, who took a largely random selection of the works. One source states that "To gain access to the caves, Stein had to hoodwink their slightly mad, …
- Pyotr Kozlov
Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov (born October 3, 1863 near Smolensk; died September 26, 1935 in Peterhof) was a Russian explorer who continued the studies of Nikolai Przhevalsky in Mongolia and Tibet. Although prepared by his parents for military career, Kozlov chose to join Przhevalsky's expedition and continued travelling in Asia with his successors, Pevtsov and Roborovsky. In 1895, he took general command of the expedition from ailing Roborovsky.
- Augustus Hoernle
Dr. Augustus Rudolf Hoernle (1841-1918) was an English Orientalist. He was born in India, the son of an Anglican priest. He attended school in Switzerland, later moving to London and studying Sanskrit under Goldstucker. He returned to India in 1865, teaching first at a University in Benares and later in Calcutta. Dr.
- Alexander Burnes
Sir Alexander Burnes (1805 - November 2, 1841) was a British traveller and explorer who took part in The Great Game. He was born in Montrose, Scotland. While serving in India in the army of the East India Company which he had joined at the age of sixteen, he learned Hindustani and Persian, and obtained an appointment as interpreter at Surat in 1822. Transferred to Cutch in 1826 as assistant to the political agent, …
- Ármin Vámbéry
Ármin Vámbéry, Arminius Vámbéry born Hermann Bamberger, or Bamberger Ármin (19 March 1832, Dunaszerdahely - 15 September 1913, Budapest) was a Hungarian orientalist and traveler.
- William Woodthorpe Tarn
Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn was a British classical scholar and a writer. He wrote extensively on the Hellenistic world, particularly on Alexander the Great. He was a Fellow of the British Academy (1928). Tarn made a rather idealistic interpretation of the Alexander's conquests, as being essentially driven by his vision of the "unity of mankind", in line with the interpretation of Plutarch ("Alexander the Great", Vol. 1).
- Arthur Conolly
Arthur Conolly (1807 - June 1842) (sometimes misspelled Connolly) was a British intelligence officer, explorer and writer. He was a captain of the Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, who worked for the British East India Company.
- Ōtani Kōzui
Count Otani Kozui was the 22nd Abbot of the West Honganji Monastery of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist sect in Kyoto, Japan. He is known for expeditions to Buddhist sites in Central Asia, such as Subashi. Between 1902 and 1910, he financed 3 expeditions to Central Asia although his participation was stopped for his succession. Otani was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and played host to several of his fellow Central Asian explorers, …