Silk Roads Visiting Scholar Lecture- Magnus Marsden (University of Sussex)

Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. He joined Sussex in November 2013 from SOAS, University of London, where he was Reader in Social Anthropology. He completed his BA and PhD at Cambridge University, where he was also a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College and Graduate Officer in Research at the Centre of South Asian Studies. His work is centrally concerned with the study of Asia's Muslim societies, and he has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, as well as with diasporic communities. His research interests span the anthropology of Islam, trade and trading networks, cosmopolitanism, migration and mobility, and Central Asia. His most recent book, Beyond the Silk Roads (Cambridge University Press, 2021), explores the lives of mobile Afghan traders traversing Eurasia. His forthcoming book, The Sheep Roads of Central Asia: A Global History of the Karakul Fur Trade (Hurst, January 2027), draws on three decades of research to illuminate the role of Jewish and Muslim Central Asian merchants in the international expansion of the Karakul lambskin trade.