Daniel Waugh

Although retired from active teaching in History (and JSIS and Slavic, my other two departments) since 2006, I am still actively involved in research, writing and lecturing on both pre-modern Russia (my original research field) and on Central Asia, especially the historic Silk Roads.

My monograph in Russian, The History of a Book: Viatka and 'Non-Modernity' in Russian Culture in the Era of Peter the Great (St. Petersburg, 2003),  uses a micro-historical approach to raise larger questions about the supposed "modernization"of Russia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries . The book benefits from my particular interests in textual criticism and codicological study of early Russian manuscripts. With my co-author,  a Slavic linguist at Uppsala University in Sweden, Ingrid Maier, we have recently published as an open-access e-book Cross-Cultural Communication in Early Modern Russia: Foreign News in Context <http://hdl.handle.net/1773/50987>. This is a substantial study (nearly 900 pages), the fruit of two decades of research.

My Central Asia interests are broad, ranging from the historic Silk Roads (about which I taught at UW for many years) and archaeology in Mongolia to the history of the "Great Game"rivalries of the 19th and early 20th centuries and civil society issues today. For more than a decade, I edited for the Silkroad Foundation what became a book-length annual, The Silk Road , available online at <https://edspace.american.edu/silkroadjournal/issues/>.  A Mellon Emeritus Fellowship in 2010 supported study/travel at Silk Road sites in the Middle East (Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey), supplementing my extensive travel, study and excavation in China, Central Asia and Mongolia. My Silk Road-related activity has included contributing to the teaching of world history and to educational websites, especially "Silk Road Seattle" <http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/>, whose resources, even if now needing updating, are widely used in classrooms around the world. Major collections of my photographs from along the "Silk Roads" are being added to the online databases of ArchNet (the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at MIT) and HEIR, at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University.

My most recent book, open-access online, is Skrine at Kashgar: Life, Exploration and Intrigue at an Outpost of Empire. A History in Documents <https://hdl.handle.net/1773/53140>, an 800-page edited and annotated collection of writings of C. P. Skrine, who was British Consul in Kashgar (Xinjiang, China) in 1922-1924 and left behind (the material in British archives) an extensive correspondence, descriptive material and photographs.