Thomas J. Barfield

THOMAS BARFIELD is a social anthropologist who received his PhD from Harvard and is currently a professor at Boston University. His fieldwork with nomads in Afghanistan during the 1970s resulted in the publication of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981). Teaming up with the late Albert Szabo, he co-authored Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991) that was awarded an Outstanding Academic Book citation in Art and Architecture by the American Library Association in 1993. In 2006 Barfield was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that led to the publication of Afghanistan: A cultural and political history (2010, updated 2nd edition 2023) that also received an outstanding Middle East & North Africa title award from the American Library Association in 2011. He is the President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. Barfield’s historical research on the rise and rule of nomadic empires over the course of two millennia resulted in the publication of The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989) that is also available in Korean, Russian and Chinese translations. Barfield's comparative study of empires more generally, Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History, will be published in October 2023.