All episodes

Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo with Timothy Thurston (U Washington Press, 2025)

The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts

The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts with Michael Khodarkovsky (Yale UP, 2026)

Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan with Thomas Gregory (Oxford UP, 2025)

Whistling Arrows and Heavenly Horses: The Han-Xiongnu War

Old Lhasa: A Biography of a Sacred City

Ryan Schweitzer, "Homosexuality in Central Asia: Stories of Hardship and Hope" (B&N Press, 2026)

Luca Anceschi, "Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion" (Routledge, 2026)

Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Nabi Sahak, "Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Galina Bogatova, "Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)

Diana T. Kudaibergen, "What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani?: Power, Identity and Nation-Building" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Olivier Hein, "Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan" (Hurst, 2026)

Chinese EVs: From Nordic Streets to Central Asian Hubs

Benjamin J. Nourse, "The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism"(Lexington Books, 2025)

David Leupold, "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives" (Routledge, 2026)

Dating Apps, Queer Stigma, and Digital Intimacy in Kazakhstan

Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Warwick Ball, "Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest" (Reaktion, 2025)

Joanna Lillis, "Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sugata Bose, "Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Zubeda Jalalzai, "Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Yasmin Cho, "Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet" (Cornell UP, 2025)

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)

Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Rivals in a Tight Embrace Russia, China, and the Central Asian Chessboard

Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025)

Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP of Colorado, 2025)

Nicholas Birman Trickett, "Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia" (Hurst, 2025)

Adeeb Khalid, "Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Zohra Saed, "Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan" (CUNY/Lost and Found, 2018)

Chris Aslan, "Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia" (Icon Books, 2024)

Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game

Laurel Victoria Gray, "Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Petya Andreeva, "Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Vicky Davis, "Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Marianne Kamp, "Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Victoria Soyan Peemot, "The Horse in My Blood: Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

J. Arch Getty and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Reflections on Stalinism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2024)

Ali Igmen, "Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides” (Princeton UP, 2010)

Zeev Levin, "Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939" (Brill, 2015)

Michael David-Fox, "The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Maria Taroutina and Allison Leigh, "Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Elena Borisova, "Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life" (UCL Press, 2024)

Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE

Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva, "Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents: Power, Morality and Resistance in Central Asia" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)

Bryan K. Miller, "Xiongnu: The World's First Nomadic Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Legal Cultures in the Russian Empire

Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah et al., "Life & Legacy: A Window into Jewish Life Across the Islamic World" (U Groningen Press, 2023)

Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation

Valerie Kivelson et al., "Picturing Russian Empire" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Christopher P. Atwood, "The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources" (Hackett, 2021)

Isaac McKean Scarborough, "Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2023)

The Secret History of the Mongols

Antony Kalashnikov, "Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time" (Cornell UP, 2023)

A Better Way to Buy Books

Yiannis Kokosalakis, "Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Archaeology and Nomadism in the Russian Empire: An interview with Ismael Biyashev

Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire

Sofia Samatar, "The White Mosque: A Memoir" (Catapult, 2022)

Alexander Jabbari, "The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov, "Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia" (Brill, 2022)

Jonan Pilet, "Nomad, Nomad" (Bound to Brew, 2021)

The Transformation of Livestock Herding in Socialist Mongolia

Nomadic Pastoralism Among the Mongol Herders

Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)

The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters

Jangar: The Heroic Epic of the Kalmyk Nomads

Star Wars: Andor’s Aldhani and its Real-World Parallels

Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018)

Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)

Tricia Starks, "Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Regine A. Spector, "Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2017)

Buddhist Medicine in Tibet: A Discussion with Bill McGrath

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Vladislav M. Zubok, "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union" (Yale UP, 2021)

James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega, "Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan" (Gaudy Boy, 2022)

John Keay, "Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Anton Weiss-Wendt and Nanci Adler, eds., "The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin's Russia" (Indiana UP, 2021)

Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)

Waleed Ziad, "Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Ian W. Campbell, "Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917" (Cornell UP, 2017)

Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, "Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Adrienne Edgar, "Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Guangtian Ha, "The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes

Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen, "Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Darren Byler, "Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City" (Duke UP, 2022)

Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)

Ayşe Zarakol, "Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Eiren L. Shea, "Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange" (Routledge, 2020)

Sandy Gall, "Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud" (Haus Publishing, 2021)