Thomas Barfield is a professor of Anthropology at Boston University, as well as the President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in northern Afghanistan, Xinjiang and Uzbekistan. He is the author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989) and co-author of Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991) and Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, 2010).