Michal Biran

Michal Biran (PhD HUJI 2000) is a historian of Inner Asia and a member of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities. She teaches at the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she led the ERC-funded project “Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia,” headed The Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, and holds the Max and Sophie Mydans Foundation Chair in the Humanities. In 2020-21 she is a member of a research group on Cultural Brokerage in Pre-Modern Islam at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies.

She has published extensively on the Mongol Empire; Mongol and Pre-Mongol Central Asia (10th-14th centuries), including the Qara Khitai, the Qarakhanids and the Chaghadaids; cross-cultural contacts between China and the Islamic world; nomadism; nomadic empires; conversion to Islam; and Ilkhanid Baghdad. She is currently working on two book projects and, together with Hodong Kim, is editing The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire for Cambridge University Press.