Robert Crews headshot

Robert Crews

Robert D. Crews is a historian whose research and teaching interests focus on Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, Russia, Islam, and Global History.  A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he received an MA in History from Columbia University and a PhD degree in History from Princeton University.

He is the author of Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015) and  For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006). He is co-editor of Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2008). His work has also appeared in Foreign AffairsForeign Policy, and The New York Times

He has served as Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Afghanistan (The American Institute of Afghanistan Studies/Edinburgh University Press).