Alberto Cacopardo is adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Florence, Italy. He has carried out ethnographic research on various populations of Chitral and neighbouring areas over a span of several decades, starting in 1973. He has published various books and articles on the subject.
Augusto S. Cacopardois Adjunct Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Florence, Italy. He has conducted anthropological field research in Chitral since the ‘70ies under the aegis of ISMEO (Italian Institute for Middle and Far-Eastern Studies) at first in Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur, subsequently among several neighboring converted Kalasha communities, and finally among the other linguistic minorities of Southern Chitral. He has published widely in English and Italian.
2005-present Professor of Human Geography, Director Centre for Development Studies in the Institute of Geographic Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin Principle Investigator ‘Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Muslim Societies’
Henrik Liljegren is a researcher in linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden), where he received his PhD in 2008. He is one of the co-founders of Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI), a resource centre for the many language communities in Pakistan’s mountainous North, where he served for several years while also conducting fieldwork in the country, primarily in the Palula community of Chitral. His main research interests are areal-linguistic typology, language contact, Indo-Iranian languages, case alignment, phonology and lexicography. Apart from research per se, Henrik Liljegren has been engaged in language maintenance efforts and orthography development, mentoring language activists in local communities to collect and organize data, and in building networks between local communities and organizations. He is presently leading a Swedish Research Council project, investigating language contact and relatedness in the Hindukush-Karakorum region.
Jo-Ann Gross is Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian History at The College of New Jersey. Her research focuses on early modern and modern Iran and Central Asia, with an emphasis on Ismailism in the Pamir and the social history of Sufism, shrines and hagiographic narrative traditions. Her book publications includeSufism in Central Asia: New Perspectives on Sufi Traditions, 15th-21st Centuries, (2018); The Letters of Khwaja ‘Ubayd Allah Ahrar and his Associates (Brill, 2002), and Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change (ed. Jo-Ann Gross, Duke UP, 1992). Prof. Gross’ current research focuses on the genealogical and documentary history (15th century to the present) of theNizariIsmailis of Badakhshan in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Since 2004, Prof. Gross has carried out archival and field research in Badakhshan to locate and photograph privately-held nasab-nāmasand interview members of the Ismaili community. She is the recent recipient of a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant (2017-2020) for her project on “Ismailism in Badakhshan: Genealogical and Documentary History.”Prof. She is presently preparing a co-authored book manuscript on Ismaili genealogical traditions in the Pamir (based on the documentary corpus), for which she intends to expand her research to include the culture of genealogical documentation in the Hindukush region of Chitral, Hunza and Gilgit.
Sadaf Munshi, Professor North Texas University
