Berkley Center

Thomas Barfield is a professor of Anthropology at Boston University, as well as the President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. He is an anthropologist who conducted ethnographic fieldwork with nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid 1970s as well as shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Uzbekistan. He is author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989) and co-author of Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991). Since 2001, his research has focused on problems of law and political development in contemporary Afghanistan. In 2007 Barfield received a Guggenheim Fellowship that led to the publication of his latest book, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, 2010).