Akram Habibulla is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Central Eurasian and Islamic Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a MLIS in 2004 from the Rutgers University, New Jersey. He also has a PhD in Arabic studies from the Academy of Science of Uzbekistan. He served as a Middle East Cataloger at the University of Chicago Library from 2004 to 2007. In 2001-2002, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and, from 1998 to 1999, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He also worked at the al-Beruni Institute for Oriental Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Anna Cieślewska is a social anthropologist. She obtained Post-doctoral degree (habilitation) in Culture and Religion Studies in 2019 based on the book Islam With a Female Face: How Women are Changing the Religious Landscape in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw. In addition, she graduated from the University of Warsaw’s School of Cross-Culture Relations with an MA degree and earned an MSC degree in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, as well as completing the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. As a result of her interest in Central Asian socio-economic development issues and the geopolitics of Central Asia and Caucasus, as well as in Islam and local traditions in the post-Soviet region, she has spent the last fifteen years working on various research and development projects in the CIS region and the Middle East.

Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has published on the modern verse, theater, and criticism of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. His research engages with theories of representation, translation, and world poetics, as well as the history of literary institutions. His current book project, entitled The Nightingales’ Congress: Poetics of the Persianate International, shows how the Soviet internationalist project of world literature emerged from sustained engagement between leftist writers of West and South Asia and state-sponsored writers of the multinational Soviet East. He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group, and his articles have appeared in Iranian Studies, Cahiers d’études iraniens, and Cahiers d’Asie centrale.

Kit Condill is the Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is a 2004 graduate of UIUC's School of Information Sciences, where he teaches a Slavic Bibliography course each fall, and a 1995 graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He spent seven years as the Central Asian Reference Specialist for (and then Manager of) the federally-funded Slavic Reference Service, and was named an inaugural Ralph T. Fisher Library Scholar in 2017. His research interests revolve around the print and online publications of the peoples of Central Eurasia, especially the North Caucasus.

Rebekah Ramsay is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Asia in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan. Her current research focuses on cultural revolution and citizenship construction in early Soviet Kazakhstan. She has begun preliminary work for a related project on the role of Central Asia in twentieth-century internationalism. At the University of Central Asia, she also supports projects related to Central Asian oral histories, cultural heritage, and digital humanities.

Jyldyz Bekbalaeva is Director of the Library at American University of Central Asia, where she manages library services and resources. She has extensive experience in e-resource management and digital collections. Jyldyz teaches courses in digital humanities and intercultural communication. Her research and publications interests include use of digital technology in humanities, digital archives, and open access. In 2017-2018, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University. She is a member of the Management Board of the EIFL Consortium. Jyldyz holds an MSLIS from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Kyrgyz National University.

Dr. Timur Dadabaev is a Professor of International Relations and the Director of the Special Program for Japanese and Eurasian Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tsukuba, Japan. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University Harriman Institute (2018), East-West Center Washington (Asia Fellow 2018), Slavic Research Center Hokkaido University (Visiting Associate Professor, 2016-2019), East Asia Institute (South Korea, Visiting Fellow 2016-2017), Oxford Center for Islamic Studies (Imam Al-Bukhari Visiting Fellow 2006), among many others.

Tokhir Kalandarov is a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His main research interests include the language and culture of Pamiri peoples and Tajik labor migration to Russia.

Nora Webb Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Political Science PhD from the University of Washington and a dual Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University. Her research addresses economic resilience and the long-term impacts of colonialism on social trust, with a regional focus on the former Soviet Union. She also writes about the impact of social media and images on protest mobilization, examining diverse cases such as the 2010 revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Notable experiences outside of the university setting include serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan and Liberia.

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

Celia Emmelhainz is the Anthropology and Qualitative Research Librarian at UC Berkeley, and previously worked as a reference librarian at Nazarbayev University in Kazahkstan. Emmelhainz holds an MLIS from Kent State University and an MA from Texas A&M University, and has done ethnographic research in Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Her research focuses on the information needs of social scientists, qualitative data archiving, and ethnographic data management; more recently, she has spent time examining a sustainable digital humanities for Central Asia.

Aziza Shanazarova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she specializes on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the broader Persianate world, with an emphasis on the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. She holds a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies completed at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2019. Before joining Columbia University, Aziza served as a UCIS/REEES Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh and taught at Stanford University.

Rano Turaeva is an Associated Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in the department of Integration and Conflict. She earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from Martin Luther University in 2011. She has worked as a consultant, lecturer, and researcher at institutions in Uzbekistan and Germany.

Dr. Elira Turdubaeva has a PhD degree in Media and Communications from Kyrgyzstan-Turkey Manas University. She worked at several universities, including a prior appointment as Department Head of Journalism and Mass Communications at American University of Central Asia. She is also a founder and current president of a new start-up Online University in Kyrgyzstan and Association of Communicators of Kyrgyzstan. Her research focuses on media uses, political participation and media, election campaign analysis, protests and social media, social media uses, network analysis, new media studies, ICT and youth, propaganda analysis, representations of gender, journalism education, media and migration, media and activism, surveillance technologies and privacy in Central Asia, hate speech and social media, etc.

Cynthia Buckley is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to her arrival at Illinois, Professor Buckley was a faculty member of both the Department of Sociology and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and also served as a Program Director at the Social Science Research Council (2010-2012). Buckley received a BA in Economics and an M.A. in Russian Studies before completing her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Her current research centers on issues of population, social equity, and development in Eurasia.

Olga Makarova is a visiting research specialist with the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois. She has experience in library reference, acquisitions, and technical services. She holds degrees in Philogy and Russian as a Foreign Language from St. Petersburg State University, as well as a MS in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Illinois. Olga's research interests include US-Soviet library relations and women's studies.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European History (with minor fields in World History and East Asian History) at Ohio State University. Tentatively titled "Cotton Modernity: Agricultural Labor, Neo-Materialism, and Soviet Power in Tajikistan, 1953-1991," his dissertation explores the history of cotton production in late-Soviet Tajikistan (1953-1991) from the perspective of the cotton workers on state and collective farms.

Jesko Schmoller is an assistant professor at the Chair for Transregional Central Asian Studies, Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin. He works on Muslim pilgrimage, saint veneration, and Sufism in the wider Eurasian space and is now writing a book manuscript about the spiritual geographies of a tariqa (mystical path). Together with Ulan Bigozhin, he contributed a chapter to the book Sufism After the USSR by Igor Pankov and Sergei Abashin.

Zayra Badillo Castro is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) in London. Her research focuses on the urban transformation of Soviet Uzbekistan in the late Soviet period and the role of architects along political elites in developing a Socialist city for the Soviet south. Badillo Castro has conducted archival research in Russia and Uzbekistan examining the debates between local authorities and Moscow, as well as on the integration of cultural practices and traditional urban forms in the project of modernisation for Central Asia in the 1960s. She holds a BA in European History from the University of Puerto Rico, a Master of Arts

in International Studies and Diplomacy, and completed a PhD in History. She is currently a host for the podcast New Books Network en español where she interviews authors from Latin America and Spain, who have published books on Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

James Plumtree earned his PhD in Medieval Studies from the CEU and University of St. Andrews as a visiting student. He holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the CEU and is a graduate of Oriel College, University of Oxford, with a BA in English Language and Literature. Currently, he works at AUCA as an Assistant Professor in the GenEd Program teaching FYS. He teaches Epic – Theory, Practice, History in the MAT program at AUCA.

Jon Giullian is the Librarian for Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Kansas University. He also serves as the editor of Slavic and East European Information Resources, a peer-reviewed journal about Slavic librarianship and book studies. His position at KU involves a wide-range of responsibilities including collections development, providing research and instructional services to various communities, and liasing with academic departments.

University of Michigan