M Nazif Shahrani is Professor of Anthropology, Central Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington and Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (2007-2011). He has also served as Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program at IU. Shahrani has done extensive anthropological field research in Afghanistan, and studied Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan & Turkey. Since 1992 he has also conducted field research in post-Soviet Muslim republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
He completed his B.A. at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and MA and Ph. D. degrees in anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle, and is a naturalized citizen of the United States. Before joining Indiana University (1990), Shahrani taught at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), The Claremont Colleges (Pitzer College) and the University of Nevada, Reno. He is recipient of Fulbright and Social Science Research Council research grants, and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Stanford Universities and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution.
He is the author of many articles and books. His current research focuses on the narratives of state-society relations and governance in multi-ethnic post-colonial failing nation-states. He is currently working on a book entitled State-Society Dynamics, Crises of Legitimacy and Governance in Post-Taliban Afghanistan.
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