At present, she is principal investigator in the nwo Vici Project "Turks, Texts and Territory: Imperial Ideology and Cultural Production in Central Eurasia." Her research interests include medieval Persian literature and manuscript traditions of the Persianate world, with a focus on the Shahnama, and the history and literature of Tajikistan.Annika Schmeding is a cultural anthropologist and Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows (2019-2023) with a decade of work and research expertise in the Middle East, South and Central Asia. She earned her doctoral degree in cultural anthropology (Boston University, 2020) based on 23-months of Wenner-Gren funded, multi-sited ethnographic research in Afghanistan. Her research explores religion, Sufism, social change, civil society, politics and conflict, statelessness and minority rights, identity and community formation.Maïra Kaye studied Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Middle Eastern history and languages at Leiden University. For her Master's thesis on Jewish Heritage in Central Asia, she conducted fieldwork in Samarqand and Bukhara. She is interested in material culture and living heritage.