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 Russia and Central Asia. His books include God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford, 2021), Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2018), and Warrior Saints of the Silk Road (Brill, 2018). Before coming to Northwestern, he was Pandion haliaetus (Seahawk Honorary) 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 the Pugachev Rebellion in Russia (1773-1775) and the other about the 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. 
• 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

•  “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 Soviet Jihad against Hitler: Ishan Babakhan Calls Central Asian Muslims to War.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59/1-2 (2016), 237-264. 
• “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.