Dilnoza Duturaeva, FRHistS

Dilnoza Duturaeva is a historian of Central Asia and China. She graduated from Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies and received her PhD in History from the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. During her PhD, she was also a visitng researcher at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Before joining the Department of History, she held a three-year DFG Research Fellowship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. She was also a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bonn and a Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at the University of Nanjing.

In addition to her research and teaching roles, Dilnoza serves as a Steering Committee Member of the Steppe Sisters Network, an international initiative dedicated to connecting and supporting women in history, archaeology and anthropology of Central Asia.

Her research interests include global history with a focus on non-European perspectives, imperial China, Islamic Central Asia, transregional nomadic empires, Silk Road studies, Sino-Islamic relations, diplomacy, trade, and cross-cultural exchange in Eurasia.

Her first book, Qarakhanid Roads to China: A History of Sino-Turkic Relations (Leiden: Brill, 2022), deals with Sino-Turkic cross-cultural contacts and international relations in the pre-Mongol period. It explores diplomacy and trade during the Northern Song and Liao dynasties in China, and the first Turko-Islamic dynasties such as the Qarakhanids in Central Asia, the Ghaznavids in Afghanistan and Northern India, and the Saljuqs in Iran and Anatolia, using Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Chinese sources along with archaeological and visual materials.

She is currently working on her second book project, which focuses on trans-Asian caravan routes and trade networks of Moghulistan with Ming China, Timurid/Shaybanid Central Asia, and Mughal India. This project reconsiders global caravan routes and aims to rehabilitate the connected history of late medieval and early modern Central Asia, which has long been dismissed as marginal and historically unconnected in the Eurasian context.