Olga Bessmertnaya is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Mansur Gazimzianov has been a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam since 2019. His doctoral project is about autobiographical accounts written by Muslims of Inner Russia in the Late Imperial and Soviet eras. This research is conducted as a part of a collective project "Muslim Individual in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” led by Dr Alfrid Bustanov and Prof. Michael Kemper and sponsored by ERC.
Rozaliya Garipova is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies at Nazarbayev University. Her research interests include Islam under Russian and Soviet rule, religious authority (male and female), Islamic family and inheritance law, women and gender in Islam, and the question of legal pluralism, in particular, the interaction between Islamic law and Russian imperial law.
Akram Habibulla is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. Akram holds a University Diploma from Tashkent State University in Uzbekistan, and a Ph. D. from the Uzbek Academy of Sciences. He earned his MLIS degree from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He works with students and faculty in those departments as the collection manager and library liaison. He supports the research and curriculum needs of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC), Department of Central Eurasian Studies, and related academic units in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His research interests focus on Arabic and Islamic studies, and on library and information science.
Agnes Kefeli has taught Tatar, history, and religious studies at Arizona State University since 1995. In her award-winning book, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Cornell University Press 2014), which received the 2015 Reginald Zelnik Prize from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, she examines four different areas: popular religion, education, gender, and the frontier. She is especially interested in conversion, popular contestation of official identities, production of religious knowledge, collective memory, and women’s activities in the religious sphere, in the past as well as in the present. Presently, she is a clinical professor on the religious studies and history faculties, where she teaches courses on World Religions, Global History, the Abrahamic traditions, and Islam in its classical and contemporary contexts for which she has designed three teaching workbooks, published respectively in 2012, 2014, and 2016 by Kendall Hunt. Kefeli also works closely with Barrett Honors students on various projects related to religion in the Phoenix area or Islam in Central Asia. Finally, she proudly serves as the current coordinator of the Islamic Studies Undergraduate Certificate and mentors graduate students specialized in Eurasian studies.
Catriona Kelly is the Honorary Professor of Russian and Soviet Culture and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College. She is the author of many books, edited collections, and articles in the area of Russian history and Russian culture from the late eighteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on urban history (particularly the history of Leningrad and St Petersburg), the preservation of architectural heritage, Russian modernism, women’s writing and gender history, the history of politeness, children’s history, and the history of cinema in the post-Stalin years, especially production history in the 1960s-1980s. She has also published literary translations, especially of poetry, and has frequently written for the general literary press , as well as making appearances on radio and TV. She has served on the editorial board of several leading journals, including Slavic Review (2011-2021), Kritika, Russian Review, Slavonic and East European Review, and Antropologicheskii forum (St Petersburg).
Sofya Ragozina received her PhD in political science in 2019). Her PhD thesis is devoted to Islamophobia in Russian print media. Postdoc research fellow at Institute of Oriental Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences), theme: ‘Being a Muslim in Russia: Politicization of Identity and Citizenship Models of Russian Muslims (case-study of Muslim Civil Activists)’); managing editor in peer-review academic journal, State, Religion and Church in Russia and Worldwide (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration). Professional interests include Sociology of Islam, Russian Islam, Political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, migration in Europe, international security.
Jeff Sahadeo is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2000. He joined Carleton after three years teaching at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. His teaching interests include diaspora, migration, and empire in Eastern Europe and Asia. He also works on issues of colonialism, nationality, frontiers, and borders in relations of power and the creation of identities and states. A specialist on the Caucasus and Central Asia, Dr. Sahadeo has conducted extensive work in several countries of the region. Dr. Sahadeo’s current research focuses on the intersection between nature and society, movement and social change through a study of rivers in the Republic of Georgia. He is also researching post-conflict peacebuilding through pluralism in Eurasia. These may include educational and achievement equity gaps, well-being, and differential health outcomes, or improving societal identities and social injustice in local, national, and international contexts.
Birgit Schäbler holds the Chair of History of West Asia (Near and Middle East) in Germany at the University of Erfurt. She founded the first German transregional research platform in 2008 at the University of Erfurt. She was the director of the Orient-Institut Beirut between October 2017 and September 2022. Her research interests have been combining history of the Middle East, Islamic Studies, Anthropology and Politics, focusing on the modern history of the Levant (Bilād al-Shām) from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. Her recent book analyzes and documents 19th century reform movements in Islam in their entanglement with Europe.
Mark Steinberg is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of many books and articles on the Russian revolution, urban history, religion, emotions, and utopias, including Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Cornell 2002; Russian Edition 2022), Petersburg Fin-de-Siècle (Yale 2011), The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 (Oxford 2017; Russian Edition 2018), the seventh through ninth (2018) editions of A History of Russia with Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford), and Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities, in the book series “Russian Shorts” (Bloomsbury 2021). He is currently working on the tenth edition of A History of Russia and Crooked and Straight in the City: Moral Stories from the Streets of New York, Bombay, and Odessa in the 1920s.
Eren Tasar is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Soviet history in 2010 from Harvard University. He is the author of the widely acclaimed Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Francesco Trupia is Assistant Professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies. He is the PI of the research project “Civic Responses and Cultural Identity Dilemmas of the Second Generation of Balkan Muslims in Time of Illiberal Democracy”, supported by the National Science Centre in Krakow (Poland). Francesco's research interests range from identity and memory politics to minority inclusion, from postsocialist democratization to the study of civil society in Southeast Europe and the Caucasus.
Olga Khan is a film researcher focusing on Uzbek contemporary cinema; she obtained a PhD in Film Studies at Chung-Ang University. From 2025 a postdoctoral fellow at CSEAS (Kyoto University). Her research interests include cultural/visual anthropology, Korean diaspora, and gender issues. Since 2023, Olga serves as CESS (Central Eurasian Studies Society) board member.
Igor Alexeev is a historian of Islam in Eurasia and the Middle East. He is a lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) and at the new master’s program “Muslim Worlds in Russia: History and Culture” at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is also the Director of Academic Programs of the Mardzhani Foundation and serves on the editorial board of the Russian-language journal Islam in the Modern World.
Akhmet Iarlykapov is a Dagestani scholar specializing in Islam in Russia, Anthropology of Religion, Ethnology, and Caucasus Studies. He works as a Senior Researcher at the Department of International Studies of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and as Senior Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences of the Higher School of Economics. Among his most influential publications are the encyclopedias Islam on the Territory of the Former Russian Empire and Religions and Peoples of Contemporary Russia. He also serves as Associate Editor of the journal International Analytics.