{"id":1280,"date":"2024-07-02T10:19:08","date_gmt":"2024-07-02T14:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=1280"},"modified":"2024-07-02T10:19:27","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T14:19:27","slug":"thomas-barfield","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/profile\/thomas-barfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Barfield"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid 1970s and shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China and post-Soviet Central Asia. He is the author of <em>The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan <\/em>(1981), <em>The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China<\/em> (1989) and <em>Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture<\/em> (1991). After 2001 his research returned to Afghanistan, focusing on law, government organization and economic development issues on which he has written extensively. In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that led to the publication of <em>Afghanistan: A cultural and political history<\/em> (2010), a book that received an outstanding title award for <em>American Library Association<\/em> in 2011.\u00a0 He has served as President of the <em>American Institute for Afghanistan Studies<\/em> since 2005.\u00a0 His forthcoming book, <em>Shadow Empires<\/em>, explores how distinctly different types empires arose and sustained themselves as the dominant polities of Eurasia and North Africa for 2500 years before disappearing in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20263,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20263"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1282,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1280\/revisions\/1282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}