Elena Paskaleva is assistant professor in Critical Heritage Studies of Asia and Europe at Leiden University. Her current research focuses on the material culture of Central Asia, and in particular on the history and socio-political importance of Timurid architecture. She is the author of Silk Road Cities documented through vintage photographs, prints and postcards (Leiden: LUP, 2019), co-author and editor of the volume Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia: Texts, Traditions and Practices, 10th-21st Centuries (Leiden Studies in Islam and Society, vol. 17: Brill, 2023). Currently, Dr. Paskaleva is editor-in-chief of the UNESCO volume Exchanges along the Silk Roads. Urbanism. Landscape. Architecture (UNESCO, 2023) and a member of the scientific panel of the UNESCO Silk Road Youth Research Grant. She has published widely on the restorations of Timurid architecture in present-day Uzbekistan. In 2014 Dr. Paskaleva was an associate at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University. At present, she is a researcher in the project “Turks, Texts and Territory: Imperial Ideology and Cultural Production in Central Eurasia” (2017-2023) funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and finalizing her monograph on the conservation of the Timurid dynastic mausoleum of Gur-i Amir in Samarqand. Dr. Paskaleva has been a strong proponent of strengthening the study and teaching of Central Asia in Leiden within the framework of the Central Asia Initiative and LUCIS. Since September 2015 she is the coordinator of the Asian Heritage Cluster at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS).
