Cambridge University Press has just released a paperback edition of NELC alum, Jeff Eden’s Slavery and Empire in Central Asia, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award.
Professor Jeff Eden graduated from UChicago in 2007, completing his NELC BA thesis on modern Uzbek poetry. His fond memories of the University of Chicago include classes with NELC’s own John Woods and Kagan Arik, as well as the late Jonathan Z. Smith of the Divinity School. Prof. Eden went on to do his MA at Indiana University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2016. After a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell's Society for the Humanities (2017-18), in 2018 he joined St. Mary's College of Maryland as Assistant Professor of History, where he teaches a range of Eurasian history classes. His research spans from the Kazakh steppe to Saudi Arabia and from Russia to Western China, with a focus on Central Asia from the early modern to the present. Dr. Eden has published three books with another forthcoming, God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2021).