Jake holds a B.A. in Russian Studies from the University of Cambridge, an M.Sc. in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University. He previously worked for three years as the Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing Specialist at Tufts University.
Jake is interested in Muslim societies in the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union, with particular regional focuses on Transoxania and the Volga-Urals. Some specific topics of interest include: the educational/religious/cultural Islamic reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known as “Jadidism;” changing practices and politicization of shrine worship in Central Asia; connected Jewish histories, especially as related to the Bukharan Jews; Russo-Ottoman-Qajar Islamic intellectual exchange; print and reading cultures in Central Asia; national identity formation in Transoxania (viz. Uzbek and Tajik nation building); changing understandings of religious and political authority in Central Asia; computational methodologies for historical research; and the role of Volga Tatars as proxy agents of empire in Central Asia.