Arash Khazeni earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and teaches Middle Eastern and Eurasian history at Pomona College. His research is focused on the imperial and environmental histories of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. His publications include Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), recipient of the Middle East Studies Association Houshang Pourshariati Book Award, and “Across the Black Sands and the Red: Travel Writing, Nature, and the Reclamation of the Eurasian Steppe, circa 1850,” International Journal of Middle East Studies (2010). He is currently working on a history of inter-Asian encounters in colonial Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Burma. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/sky_blue_stone_the_turquoise_trade_and_eurasian_empires