Activity: Azim Malikov is a historian and social anthropologist specializing in Central Asia. He currently works in the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc. From 2018 to 2022, he was a member of the research project Sinophone Borderlands – Interactions at the Edges. Previously, he served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology of the Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. In 2003, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, where he conducted research on Uzbek identity in the 20th and early 21st centuries. In 2002 and 2004, he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, working on a project focused on the identities of Uzbek tribes and the relationship between tribal structures and the state in the Bukhara Emirate. From 2004 to 2005, Dr. Malikov directed the Centre for the Study of the History of Uzbekistan at Samarkand State University. Between 2010 and 2013, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany, where he led the project Khoja in Central Asia: Construction and Transformation of Identity. He was also a Foreign Visiting Fellow at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (SRC) of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan (2017–2018). Since 1993, Dr. Malikov has taught courses on the history, identity, and culture of the peoples of Central Asia. He has taught at Samarkand State University (Uzbekistan), Balkh University (Afghanistan), and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). His research interests include identity construction, Islam, nationalism, the politics of memory, historical migrations, intercultural relations, and transregional Islamic networks. He is particularly interested in the production of historical knowledge in Central Asian societies, as well as sacred lineages in Central Asia—especially in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan. He has also conducted extensive research on various aspects of the history of Samarkand.