DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Modern European History: Central/Eastern Europe; Asian History

Thematic Field(s):  Religious History; Colonial, Imperial, & Diasporic History; Urban History; War and Empire in History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus

Biography

Jeff Eden (Ph.D., Harvard, 2016) is a historian of Central Asia, Russia, and the Caucasus. His books include God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford, 2021; paperback 2025), which was named one of Foreign Affairs' "Best Books of 2022"; Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2018; paperback 2020), which was shortlisted for the CESS Book Award; and Warrior Saints of the Silk Road: Legends of the Qarakhanids (Brill, 2018). Before coming to Northwestern, he was Pandion Haliaetus Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and before that he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. He is currently working on two book projects, one about Turkmens in nineteenth-century Iran and the other about the Soviet Caucasus during the Second World War. At Northwestern, he teaches classes on Russian, Central Asian, and global history. Links to some of Eden's articles (etc.) can be found on [this website].

Selected Publications

Books 

• God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; paperback 2025.
• Slavery and Empire in Central Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018; paperback 2020. 
• Warrior Saints of the Silk Road: Legends of the Qarakhanids. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 
• The Life of Muhammad Sharif: A Central Asian Sufi Hagiography in Chaghatay. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences,  2015.

Edited Volumes 

• From the Khan’s Oven: Studies on the History of Central Asian Religions in Honor of Devin DeWeese. Co-edited with Eren Tasar and Allen J. Frank. Leiden: Brill, 2021. 
• Beyond Modernism: Rethinking Cultural Change in Muslim Eurasia (19th-20th Centuries). Co-edited with Devin DeWeese and Paolo Sartori. Double theme-issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59/1-2 (2016). 

Selected Articles

• “Rescuers or Pirates? The Steamship Lomonosoff’s Escape from Murmansk and the 1920 Trial.” Journal of Legal History, forthcoming 2025.
• "Anatomy of a Caravan Raid: Peril and Possibility in the Kazakh Steppe, 1800-1860." Journal of Central Asian History 2/1 (2023), pp. 1-32. 
•  “Beyond the Bazaars: Geographies of the Slave Trade in Central Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 51/4 (2017), 919-955. 
• “Did Ibn Saʿud’s Militants Cause 400,000 Casualties? Myths and Evidence about the Wahhabi Conquests, 1902- 1925.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46/4 (2019), 519-534. 
• “A Sufi Saint in Sixteenth-Century East Turkistan: New Evidence Concerning the Life of Khwāja Isḥāq.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 25/2 (April, 2015), 229-245.