Dr. Thomas J. Barfield is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University, where he has taught since 1989 and served two terms as department chair (1989–2006, 2016–2019). He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Alongside his scholarship, he has an extensive record of institutional leadership: he directed Boston University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations (2008–2014), has served as President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies since 2005 (and on its Board of Directors since 2003), and previously led the Central Eurasian Studies Society as President (2004–05) and the New England Council of the Association for Asian Studies (1991–92). He also sits on the editorial and advisory boards of several leading area-studies journals, including Afghanistan (University of Edinburgh Press) and Central Asian Survey.
Professor Barfield’s research career began with ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, followed by studies of nomadic societies in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Central Asia. Since 2001, his work has returned to Afghanistan, examining law, governance, and economic development in the country’s post-conflict transitions. He is a leading authority on Afghan history, society, and politics, and the author of many books, including The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989), Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991), and Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010; expanded second edition, 2022), which received the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Title award and has been translated into Italian and Turkish. His most recent book, Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History (2023, Princeton University Press), examines the rise and endurance of distinct imperial forms across Eurasia and North Africa. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Specialist, he has also written extensively on contemporary Afghan policy, including a 2021 USIP issue paper on ending the war in Afghanistan through multilateral engagement.
Recent Publications:
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Expanded 2nd edition; 1st edition 2010). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Winner, Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association, 2011.
Link: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691238562/afghanistan “Afghan Political Ecologies: Templates Past and Present from the Eastern Iranian World.” Book chapter in Limits of Empire in Ancient Afghanistan, ed. Richard Payne and Rhyne King (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag), pp. 1–20.
Link (table of contents confirming Barfield as chapter author): https://www.biblioiranica.info/the-limits-of-empire-in-ancient-afghanistan/