Biography
After the completion of a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies (History and Philology) at the University of Rome ‘la Sapienza” (2006),’ he has been a Volkswagen Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Martin-Luther University in Halle/Wittenberg from 2007 to 2011. A fellow of the Institute of Iranian Studies since 2011, he has been the recipient of various academic distinctions such as the Start Award by the Austrian Science Fund (2013); the Best Publication Award by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2014); the elected membership of the Austrian Young Academy (2016); the Ab Imperio Award for the Best Study in New Imperial History in Northern Eurasia (2019); elected Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2023)
He has two main fields of interest in his current research: the history of knowledge production about Islam in the Russian Empire, with a special focus on the formation of archives in the post-Petrine era; and Soviet Muslimness, with special attention devoted to Central Asia after the Second World War. His recent publications include an essay on the so-called ‘Mansurov affair,’ the first major case of pan-Islamism in the history of the Russian Empire (Cahiers du Monde russe) and a monograph entitled A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, 1943-1991.
He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, theJournal of Central Asian History (Brill) and as the Chairman of the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia (https://www.oeaw.ac.at/sice).
Main Areas of Research
Main Areas of Research
- Epistemologies of writing, documentation, and archives in the Persianate world (15th-19th Centuries)
- Locality and remoteness in modern Central Asia (18th-21st Centuries)
- Islamic law in imperial Russia
- Soviet Islam
Current Projects
Current Projects
- Seeing Like an Archive: Documents and Forms of Governance in Islamic Central Asia (START Project, FWF)
Selected Publications
Selected Publications
Monographs
- Seeking Justice at the Court of the Khans of Khiva (19th-Early 20th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2020): [co-authored with Ulfat Abdurasulov]
- Éksperimenty imperii: adat, shariat, i proizvodtsvo znanii v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2019): [co-authored with Pavel Shabley]
- Visions of Justice: Sharīʿa and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Leiden: Brill [HdO8 Series], 2016), pp. 415
Articles
- “From Demotic to the Literary: The Ascendance of the Vernacular Turkic in Central Asia (18th - 19th Centuries),” Eurasian Studies XVIII/2 (2020): pp. 213-254
- “Between Kazan and Kashghar: On the Vernacularization of Islamic Jurisprudence in Eurasia”, Die Welt des Islams Vol. 60.3 (2020): 1-31
- “A Sound of Silence in the Archives: On 18th-Century Russian Diplomacy and the Historical Episteme of Central Asian Hostility,” Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions Vol. 44.3 (2020): 1-20
- “The World as Seen from the Mufiate’s Windows [Book Forum on Eren Tasar’s Soviet and Muslim],” Central Asian Affairs 7/4 (2020): 357-367
- “The Sovereign’s Brigands: Reflections on Forms of Governance in Central Asian History,” Comparatives Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40/3 (2020): 478-482
- “From the Archetypical Archive to Cultures of Documentation,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62/5-6 (2019): 773-798 (co-authored with James Pickett)
- “Of Saints, Shrines, and Tractors: Untangling the Meaning of Islam in Soviet Central Asia,” Journal of Islamic Studies 30/3 (2019): 1-40