New Books in Central Asian Studies
by Marshall Poe
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/central-asian-studies
Episodes
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Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo with Timothy Thurston (U Washington Press, 2025)
The podcast covers the book Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo (U Washington Press, 2025), which is about satirical speech traditons from Amdo region of Tibet and the role of zurza in Tibetan cultural production and modernity. Tune in to find out more about satire,...
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The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts
Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe...
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The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts with Michael Khodarkovsky (Yale UP, 2026)
What is Russia? For two centuries, observers inside and outside the country have tried to answer that question, and most of them have looked west. The familiar story holds that Peter the Great pulled a backward Muscovy toward Europe and that Catherine the Great finished the job by declaring…
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Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan with Thomas Gregory (Oxford UP, 2025)
Thomas Gregory is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, Weaponizing Civilian Protection (Oxford UP, 2025), exposes how coalition efforts to minimize and mitigate civilian casualties during the recent conflict in...
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Whistling Arrows and Heavenly Horses: The Han-Xiongnu War
John Ross speaks with Scott Forbes Crawford about his book The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) For more than two centuries, Han China fought a bitter struggle against the Xiongnu, a powerful confederation of horse-riding nomads from the Asian steppe. This was far more...
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Old Lhasa: A Biography of a Sacred City
Michael Aldrich joins John Ross to discuss Old Lhasa: A Biography, his richly detailed portrait of Tibet’s historic capital. It’s the third book in his trilogy on Asian cultural centers. He wrote the first two, on Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, while living in those cities, where he worked as a lawyer....
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Ryan Schweitzer, "Homosexuality in Central Asia: Stories of Hardship and Hope" (B&N Press, 2026)
Homosexuality in Central Asia: Stories of Hardship and Hope (Barnes and Noble Press, 2026) is Ryan Michael Schweitzer's collection of first-hand narratives from LGBTQ individuals across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the region,...
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Luca Anceschi, "Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion" (Routledge, 2026)
Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion (Routledge, 2026) examines how the authoritarian regimes of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan exploited the Covid-19 pandemic to consolidate their political control over Central Asia. Through restrictive policies and strategic...
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Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite...
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Nabi Sahak, "Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the modern world. The roughly...
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Galina Bogatova, "Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)
Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms (Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors, revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify control, including its full-scale...
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Diana T. Kudaibergen, "What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani?: Power, Identity and Nation-Building" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In early 2022, protests rocked Kazakhstan. Initially peaceful demonstrations turned violent after brutal government crackdowns, leaving at least 238 dead during "Bloody January." Many feared the unrest might fracture the country along ethno-linguistic lines—yet ethnicity played little role. It…
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Olivier Hein, "Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan" (Hurst, 2026)
Turkmenistan rarely makes international headlines–and when it did, it was often stories that highlighted things like the strange cult of personality that surrounded Saparmurat Niyazov, its first post-Soviet president, who named months after himself and made his memoir required reading. Olivier...
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Chinese EVs: From Nordic Streets to Central Asian Hubs
Can Europe afford to stand back as China rewrites the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem? In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to United Nations Senior Adviser Matthew Gray for Europe and Central Asia Markets, who discusses the rapid international expansion…
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Benjamin J. Nourse, "The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism"(Lexington Books, 2025)
The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2025) is a rich exploration of the history of Tibetan books during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Looking at this ‘golden age’ of book production, Benjamin Nourse focuses on two core topics: What was...
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David Leupold, "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives" (Routledge, 2026)
What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city, but to show how the...
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Dating Apps, Queer Stigma, and Digital Intimacy in Kazakhstan
How queer men in Kazakhstan navigate dating apps in a context of stigma, surveillance, and limited legal protections. It shows how platforms like Grindr, Hornet, Tinder, and VKontakte function as spaces where trust, visibility, and safety must be continuously negotiated. This episode explores how...
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Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government…
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Warwick Ball, "Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest" (Reaktion, 2025)
Today, Afghanistan–if it ever reaches global headlines–is portrayed as an unstable land, known more for the wars great powers fight (and often lose) on its territory. Yet for most of human history, Afghanistan wasn’t on the margins of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right. In his new...
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Joanna Lillis, "Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
In September 2016, Islam Karimov–the first president of a post-Soviet Uzbekistan–died, at age 78. His death ended an oppressive dictatorship that had governed the Central Asian country for decades, which led to corruption, environmental damage, and political repression. Karimov was replaced with...
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Sugata Bose, "Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century" (Harvard UP, 2024)
The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century (Harvard UP, 2024) is a bold new interpretation of the period, focusing on the...
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Zubeda Jalalzai, "Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Zubeda Jalalzai about her book Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023). Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan, analyzes the role literature and poetic sensibility played in colonial British...
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Yasmin Cho, "Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddhist revival in China, illustrating the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns and exploring the political effects that arise from their nonpolitical daily...
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Martyn Whittock, "Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine" (Biteback, 2025)
In Western Europe, we typically associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords and the attacks on the monasteries and settlements of north-western Europe. This popular image rarely includes the river systems of Russia and...
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Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
As the First World War drew to a close and regimes began to collapse across Europe, British officials plotted a daring campaign to send an unlikely band of maverick soldiers, diplomats and spies to the chaotic region around the Caspian Sea. Their mission: to block the advance of the Turks, to…
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Rivals in a Tight Embrace Russia, China, and the Central Asian Chessboard
This podcast episode by Alevtina Solovyeva traces Central Asia as the enduring crossroads “between empires,” where caravan routes outlast the borders drawn over them. It opens with the Silk Roads: trade as the region’s original superpower – moving goods, ideas, and identities. The narrative then...
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Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025)
Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions…
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Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP of Colorado, 2025)
Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE....
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Nicholas Birman Trickett, "Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia" (Hurst, 2025)
Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards an increasingly coercive authoritarianism, a hubristic challenge to the West, and all-out war with Ukraine. Decades of dependence on commodity exports,...
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Adeeb Khalid, "Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2021)
In Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021), Adeeb Khalid presents a comprehensive narrative of modern Central Asian history based on original research and an exhaustive synthesis of recent scholarship. Khalid explores how the…
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Zohra Saed, "Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan" (CUNY/Lost and Found, 2018)
In 1932, along with a group of African American activists and writers including novelist Dorothy West, Langston Hughes journeyed to the Soviet Union. Veering off from the “official” trip, Hughes met Arthur Koestler before venturing on to an extended journey through the newly formed republics of...
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Chris Aslan, "Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia" (Icon Books, 2024)
The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn’t the only textile trade that’s made its mark on Central Asia, the subject of Chris Aslan’s latest book Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia...
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Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game
On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the Soviet Union once showcased cotton production to visiting delegations—particularly from...
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Laurel Victoria Gray, "Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first comprehensive work in English on the three major regional styles of Uzbek women's dance – Ferghana, Khiva and Bukhara – and their broader Silk Road cultural connections, from folklore roots to...
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Petya Andreeva, "Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian...
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Vicky Davis, "Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stalin in the Second World War. Based on meticulous archival research, it considers the interactions…
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Marianne Kamp, "Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization...
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Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they...
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Victoria Soyan Peemot, "The Horse in My Blood: Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
A fascinating interspecies relationship can be seen among the horse breeding pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains of Inner Asia. Growing up in a community with close human-horse relationships, in The Horse in My Blood: Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains (Berghahn…
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Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign...
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J. Arch Getty and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Reflections on Stalinism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2024)
In this episode, Alisa talks with Lewis H. Siegelbaum, who, along with J. Arch Getty, edited Reflections on Stalinism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024), a collection of essays by twelve prominent scholars in the field who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of...
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Ali Igmen, "Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
In this episode, Alisa talks with Ali İğmen, Professor of Central Asian History and the Director of the Oral History Program at California State University. In his book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan, Dr. İğmen examines Soviet Russia’s efforts to reshape local...
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Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides” (Princeton UP, 2010)
Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of...
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Zeev Levin, "Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939" (Brill, 2015)
In Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939 (Brill, 2015), Zeev Levin seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of government efforts to socialize the Jewish masses in Uzbekistan, a process in which the central Soviet government took…
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Michael David-Fox, "The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) compiles an array of recent scholarship that draws on newly available archival evidence. This interview with the book's editor, Dr. Michael David-Fox, summarizes what these new findings add up to, and...
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Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociological problem of the usage of new media (social media, the Internet, digital technologies, messaging applications) by young people in political...
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Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism" (Princeton UP, 2018)
The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism mean in the Soviet Union? What was its relationship with religion? In her new book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, Dr....
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Maria Taroutina and Allison Leigh, "Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940 (Manchester UP, 2023) features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the...
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Elena Borisova, "Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life" (UCL Press, 2024)
Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet...
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Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE
Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this...
About this show
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/central-asian-studies
Hosted by
Marshall Poe