Robert Crews

Crews is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds an M.A. in history from Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

In the 1998–1999 academic year, as a Princeton history doctoral student, he held a Whiting Foundation dissertation fellowship for a dissertation titled “The House of Islam in a Christian Empire: Law, Religion, and the State in Nineteenth Century Russia.”⁠[2]

From August 2002 to January 2003, while an assistant professor of history at Stanford University, he was a Title VIII-supported research scholar at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, working on “A Faith for the Tsar: Islam, Community, and the State in Imperial Russia,” which examined how a non-liberal form of toleration integrated Muslim communities into the institutions of the Russian empire.⁠[3]

In 2006 Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry Press published his For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia; a review called it original, intelligent and well researched and said he convincingly argued that Russia could rule one of the world’s largest Muslim populations for 500 years only because of a symbiosis between empire and Islam.⁠[4]

Historian Adeeb Khalid, in the London Review of Books, criticized the book for overcompensating, arguing that evidence drawn mainly from the archives of the Orenburg Assembly for the mid-19th century was generalized into a single “Islam policy” for the whole empire, without adequate use of Muslim sources.⁠[5]

Reviewing it in the Middle East Quarterly, Kara Flook argued that the book showed strong ties between imperial authority and Muslim communities without proving the relationship was mutual, while praising its historical detail as groundbreaking.⁠[6]

In 2008 Harvard University Press published The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, which he co-edited with Amin Tarzi; in 2012 he co-edited Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands with Shahzad Bashir.⁠[7]

He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2009, having received Stanford’s Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching for First Years of Teaching in 2006–2007.⁠[8]

On September 11, 2011, he published an opinion piece with Al Jazeera on the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan, then in its tenth year, and on widespread fears that the Taliban was poised to return to power.⁠[9]

Foreign Affairs published his essay “Moscow and the Mosque” in its March/April 2014 issue, on the Putin government’s dealings with Russia’s Muslim clerics; in a letter, Vasily Rudich argued that the essay painted a rosier picture of Russia’s Muslims than reality and that the more important story was rising tension between the country’s two largest religious communities.⁠[10]

In 2015 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published his Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation, tracing Afghans’ global connections back to early modern imperial networks and rejecting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the European powers’ “Great Game” and of Afghanistan as a “hermit kingdom.”⁠[11]

In April 2015, then an associate professor of history at Stanford, he spoke at Ohio State University on “Leaving the ‘Graveyard of Empires’,” presenting the book’s placing of Afghan globalism at the core of a reinterpretation of Afghan history.⁠[7]

Reviewer Steve Donoghue found the book concise and interesting but argued that its thesis that Afghanistan has always been more global than credited largely fails and criticized its account of the Taliban’s 1995 detention of a Russian aircrew as euphemistic.⁠[12]

In 2016 he published “America’s Afghan Refugee Crisis” in Foreign Policy, arguing that after more than 50 years the United States had caused more harm than good in Afghanistan and should accept responsibility for the refugee crisis.⁠[13]

In April 2016 he contributed to a New York Times expert debate on whether the United States bore responsibility for Afghan refugees, arguing that it should resettle a significant portion of Afghan migrants.⁠[14]

That month he discussed the issue on Democracy Now!, which introduced him as an associate professor of history and director of Stanford’s Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.⁠[15]

From 2020 to 2025 he was editor-in-chief of the journal Afghanistan, published by the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies and Edinburgh University Press; he has also directed Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.⁠[8]

In July 2021, as U.S. troops prepared to leave Afghanistan by August 31, he said the key question was whether the Afghan government or another international force could stop a resurgent Taliban from seizing power by force; he described palpable anxiety in the cities, fears of genocide among marginalized communities such as the Hazaras, and uncertainty over women’s access to schools and work.⁠[16]

On November 28, 2021, he appeared on episode #244 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, introduced as a Stanford historian specializing in Afghanistan, Russia, Islam, Central Asia and South Asia; topics included the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, September 11, Bin Laden, the withdrawal of U.S. troops, war, leadership, the Afghan people and Rumi.⁠[17]

In 2025 Duke University Press published Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power, which he co-edited with Wazhmah Osman of Temple University and which the publisher calls the first comprehensive volume on the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present; he wrote its chapter “Afghanistan and the Soviet Colonial Archive.”⁠[18]

As of October 2026 his research and teaching at Stanford focus on Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, Russia, Islam and global history.⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/RobertCrews22 (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]