Thomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conducted ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, as well as research in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Central Asia. He is the author of several major works, including The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier (1989), and Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991). After 2001, his research returned to Afghanistan, focusing on law, governance, and economic development. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which led to the publication of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010), later republished in an expanded second edition in 2022. The book received an Outstanding Title Award from the American Library Association. He has served as President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies since 2005. His most recent book, Shadow Empires, explores how empires across Eurasia and North Africa developed and sustained power over the course of 2,500 years.
Thomas Barfield
Guest Speaker
Professor of Anthropology, Boston University