Eurasia

This dissertation examines the emergence of the Qājār monarchy of Iran (1786 – 1925) from the vantage point of the Caspian Sea. It examines the ways in which eighteenth-century autonomous rulers of northern Iran harnessed the resources and wealth of the Caspian littoral to conso…

This dissertation is about the power of sound, how sound influences and is influenced by emotion, how emotion influences national politics, and how those politics spill over into international and intercultural relations. Specifically, it is about a shared double-reed musical in…

This dissertation is an analysis of encounters between the Soviet Union and Turkey in the years between the First and Second World Wars. While bilateral relations play an important role, the scope is wider than that of a diplomatic history; the dissertation places elements of th…

Securing energy resources has become a key aspect of foreign policy-making since the 1970s. States have used military and economic foreign policy tools to secure the supply of energy to their domestic markets. With the fall of the USSR in 1991, political and economic competition…

This dissertation, a study of trade life in western Siberia in the early modern period, focuses on the careers and practices of merchants groups to whom that Russian state awarded various privileges in early modern and early imperial Russia. These groups were Orthodox Russian me…

While much of the contemporary quantitative research in intra-state conflicts focuses on explaining the causes of these conflicts using large-N studies, these models have limited forecasting power, i.e., they cannot be used in making predictions about whether or not an intra-sta…

This dissertation examines the relationship between horse riding and social dynamics in nomadic Mongolian societies through the analysis of muscle attachment sites on the skeleton called entheses. Nomadic societies have traditionally been portrayed as static, homogenous, and par…

As the birthplace of the Naqshbandiyya, Yasaviyya, and Kubrawiyya, Central Asia has received a significant amount of scholarly attention in the field of Sufi Studies, though the study of the nineteenth century is relatively underdeveloped. While scholars have done much to demons…

The post-Soviet region is the only area of the world in which every state is secular. Since independence in 1991, each of the 15 states has formally declared its secular nature; however, they have had drastically different policies towards religion. The Baltic states and Ukraine…

This study focuses on the nature of social and economic interaction among Late Bronze Age (c.1800–1500 BC) pastoralists of the mountainous steppes of Semirech'ya (eastern Kazakhstan). This period is typically documented in terms of various regional archaeological culture groups …

Since becoming independent in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has endured two revolutions, ethnic violence, and economic decay. Against this tumultuous background have been ongoing attempts to construct a viable Kyrgyz nationalism and the “resurgence” of religion in the public sphere. In many …

This dissertation is a 'thick' description and analysis of the institutions, practices and mentalités that framed a vital arena for the daily lives of the cosmopolitan denizens of mid-eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia. It was within this arena that men, goods, ideas and knowled…