Biographical Sketches
Keynote Speaker
Robert D. Crews is an historian whose research and teaching interests focus on Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, Russia, Islam, and Global History. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he received an MA in History from Columbia University and a PhD degree in History from Princeton University.
He is the author of Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015) and For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006) and co-editor of Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2008). His work has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times.
Panel 1 – Archives and oral history
Burzine Waghmar (SOAS, University of London)
Burzine Waghmar is at SOAS the South Asian and Indo-Iranian Languages Librarian; Senior Teaching Fellow (Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and Pashto); former editor of the Circle of Inner Asian newsletter (2001-05); and member, Centre for Iranian Studies, Centre for the Study of Pakistan and SOAS South Asia Institute. He is also an honorary fellow of the European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) and a governing body member of Bombay’s K R Cama Oriental Institute, where he convened a seminar, From Nisa to Niya: Reappraising Cultural Conduits and Commercial Centres along the Silk Road, 6-7 January, 2018. Its forthcoming volume of papers is under his editorship. He co-edited recently with Sunil Sharma, Firdawsii Millennium Indicum: Proceedings of the Shahnama Millenary Seminar 8-9 January, 2011 (Mumbai, 2016). Besides authoring articles, encyclopaedia entries and book reviews, he also edited the posthumous English edition of Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Moghuls: History, Art, culture (London, 2004); and co-compiled Bibliography of the Works of the Scholar-Hermit, Prof. Dr. Annemarie Schimmel from 1943 through 2003 (Lahore, 2004). Burzine served as research consultant to Sarah Stewart, curator of The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination exhibition at SOAS (2013), which was next mounted at the National Museum, New Delhi (2016). Concomitantly at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) was a PARZOR exhibition curated and edited by Shernaz Cama, Threads of Continuity: Zoroastrian Life and Culture, whose namesake catalogue's lead essay was authored by him. Both exhibitions were subvented by the Ministries of Culture and Minority Affairs, Government of India during 2016, which year saw him also deliver the centennial lecture of the history of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the Royal Asiatic Society, London.
Azadeh Sobout (University of Manchester)
Azadeh Sobout’s research focuses on the complex social and spatial structures and processes that produce geographies of displacement, marginalisation and oppression. Building on her research with Afghan, Palestinian and Syrian refugees, her overriding focus is on interrogating social and spatial injustices to promote grassroots understanding of justice in post-conflict and transitional spaces. As a post-doctoral researcher with University of Manchester, her current research interests include spatial approaches to peace building, memory politics and the role of arts in peace formation processes. Inspired by post-colonial and visual approaches to scholarship, Azadeh is interested in the ways in which marginalised voices can be brought to the forefront of research.
Paul Bucherer-Dietschi (Phototheca Afghanica)
A native of Switzerland and a Swiss citizen, Paul Bucherer-Dietschi was born in 1942 and trained as an architect. Since 1972 he has been a professor of architecture at the Liestal technical training school. In 1971 he first visited Iran, Pakistan (Baluchistan), and Afghanistan. Through many subsequent visits and intensive study, he became an expert on Afghanistan, the people, the society and the culture. He founded Bibliotheca Afghanica as a research and cultural center to promote study of Afghanistan in the mid-1970s. Over the years the foundation has become an important source of information about Afghanistan in Europe with a large collection of books, journals, photographs, etc. During the Soviet occupation, the Foundation published annual reports on the situation in Afghanistan which were distributed in Switzerland and were translated into English by the Congressional Research Service. Bucherer has authored other important studies including data bases on „Violations of Human Rights in Afghanistan“ for the UN Commission on Human Rights and edited a series of books and papers on Afghanistan, published by the Foundation. He helped organize a series of meetings between the different Afghan factions following the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan and at the time of the Taliban in the hope of promoting an end to intra-Afghan strife. In addition to his professional teaching of architecture, Bucherer has given courses on various aspects of Afghanistan since 1981 at the Swiss Military Academy and since 1982 at the University of Basle. He spoke on Afghanistan and Central Asia at the Zurich University and at Geneva. In addition, Bucherer speaks on Afghanistan frequently at service clubs, schools and organizations, international conferences and also contributed numerous articles on Afghanistan to the Swiss media.
Panel 2 – Coloniality, independence, historiography
Marcello Fantoni (University of Kent)
Marcello Fantoni was an Archaeology and Anthropology student at St Hugh’s College, the University of Oxford, and recently started an MA and PhD program studying Social Anthropology and Conflict at the University of Kent. He has contributed at seminars such as the annual meeting of the Central Asian Studies Seminar Group in 2017 and has contributed to online publications on the history and use of small arms in Central Asia. He has also co-authored published and forthcoming material on the archaeology of equestrian nomadism in Mongolia. He is also the founder and president of the Oxford University Silk Roads Society which is a student led society that organises academic events and invites speakers to discuss topics ranging from history to current affairs, former guests include the ambassadors of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. He has worked in Afghanistan with the French Archaeological Delegation (DAFA) and the Italian institute of eastern and oriental studies in Pakistan.
Mateusz M. Kłagisz (Jagiellonian University)
Dr. Mateusz M. Kłagisz works at the Department of Iranian Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and administrates the Afghan Archive originally organised by Prof. Jadwiga Pstrusińska. His main area of research on Afghanistan includes literature (modern Dari short stories), folklore (Pashto landays) as well as history (modernisation vs. de-modernisation, especially in the communist period (1978–1992).
Tariq Basharat (SOAS, University of London)
Tariq Basharat is a second year PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His research looks at the fusion of intellectual and socio-political history in 20th century Afghanistan by focusing upon the Nationalist historiography of pre-Islamic Afghanistan during the Musahiban period (1930-1978) and the way in which that research fed into and fed off the socio-political developments of the time.
Women's Poetry and music
Rachel Lehr (University of Colorado Boulder)
For more than 25 years Rachel Lehr has examined the languages and cultures of central and south Asia, while living and working in the region. Lehr’s work on the languages of Afghanistan addresses linguistics, poetry, gendered geographies, and diasporic narratives. Lehr earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago writing a descriptive grammar of Pashai, a minority language spoken in eastern Afghanistan. Lehr’s translation from Tajik of The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini with John R. Perry was awarded the 2004 Lois Roth Endowment Persian Translation Prize. Her latest book The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and other American-Afghan Entanglements, co-authored with Jennifer Fluri, explores the everyday actions of people associated with the international effort in the post 9/11 era. Dr. Lehr is one of the founders of Language, Legacy and Landey, an initiative whose aim is to highlight landey poetry through publications, performance and civic engagement. This initiative joins historical and contemporary literary traditions, women’s voices and freedom of expression, all in the context of global migration.
John Baily (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Professor Baily John Baily is Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of the Afghanistan Music Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. In the 1970s he and his wife Veronica Doubleday spent two years conducting ethnomusicological fieldwork in and around the city of Herat in western Afghanistan. He later worked with Afghan musicians in exile in Peshawar, Mashhad, London, Hamburg, Fremont, Sydney and Melbourne. After 2002 he made several visits to Kabul to gauge the state of music after the prohibitions introduced by the Taliban, and established the Tradition Bearers Programme for the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia, which along with the Afghanistan National Institute of music is one of the most important music schools in Kabul today. Much of his recent research is recounted in his monograph War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale, published in 2016.
Panel 3 – State-building amidst conflict
Shoaib Rahim (Afghanistan Affairs Unit)
Shoaib Ahmad Rahim is Regional Economic Analyst at Afghanistan Affairs Unit (Kabul based think tank) and Assistant Professor of Economics. He has earned an MBA degree in Finance from Institute of Management Sciences, Pakistan and an MSc degree in Development Economics from University of Sussex, England. He has worked as development practitioner in Afghanistan for over a decade and has had the privilege to work in key areas including private sector development, financial sector reforms, economic growth, agriculture and rural development. He regularly opines about economy of Afghanistan and political economy of the region through his media appearances, newspaper articles and papers published in English, Hindi, Dari (Persian) and Russian languages.
Wil Patrick (University of Victoria)
Wil Patrick is a Doctoral Candidate in the Critical Geographies Research Lab at the University of Victoria and has received an MA from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism from the University of Western Ontario. He is a political geographer interested in local self-governance in Afghanistan.
Adam Alimi (York University)
Adam Alimi is a PhD student from York University in Toronto, Canada. His research interests lie in the fields of global political economy and development studies. More specifically, he is interested in the developmental state literatures in the periphery and semi-periphery of the world system. Other topics of interest relate to the history of Afghanistan and critical theories of the state.
Sarajuddin Isar (SOAS, University of London)
Sarajuddin Isar is a Political Economy researcher with extensive experience in banking, finance and international development. He is a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and his research focus is on taxation and state-building in post Bonn Afghanistan. Isar is a researcher with two old London-based magazines –the Accountant and the International Accounting Bulletin. He worked as a visiting scholar with Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) in Kabul as well as with Open University, Oliver Wyman and BBC in London. He was the Editor for Simorg- a trilingual Fortnightly Newspaper published by Afghan diaspora in London. He was also the Chief of Staff of the Governor of the Central Bank and worked in a series of organizations including the USAID/BearingPoint, UN/WFP and international charities such as the Catholic Relief Services, Acted, Afghanaid and Oxfam.
Kawun Kakar (Kakar History Foundation)
Kawun Kakar holds Jurist Doctorate from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco and has Bacherlor degrees in Political Scinces and History from the University of California, San Diego. An active member of the California Bar Association, Mr Kakar is currently the Founder and Managing Partner of Kakar Advocates, a full service law firm based in Kabul, Afghanistan with a liasion office in Virginia, USA. He is also the Executive Director of Kakar History Foundation, named after his late father historian and professor M. Hassan Kakar.