Robert Crews’ most recent book, Afghan Modern: A Global History (forthcoming with Harvard University Press), sets out to overturn the long-established and enduring portrayal of Afghanistan as a desolate, inward-looking and isolated place. Crews argues that the ways Afghan society has been conceptualized in journalism, public policy debates and scholarship remain mired in such tropes, and that these have little connection with historical reality. With this book, Crews puts Afghan globalism at the core of a reinterpretation of the history of Afghanistan. His talk will discuss the myriad ways that Afghans have engaged and connected with the wider world, and how that those connections have shaped the ways they came to inhabit our globalized modernity.
Robert Crews is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University. He is author of For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard UP, 2006), co-editor (with Amin Tarzi) of The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Harvard UP, 2008), and co-editor (with Shahzad Bashir) of Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard UP, 2012).
