Anca Dan
Prof. Anca Dan is Professor of Classics and CNRS researcher (University Paris Sciences & Letters, École Normale Supérieure) working on Greek geography, ethnography and cultural transfers between Greeks and “Barbarians” (Thracian, Scythian, Iranian, Jewish populations).
As an archaeologist, she co-directs a research project in Doriskos (Greece, through a collaboration between the French School in Athens and the Ephorias of Alexandroupoli and Komotini); she has worked on various Greek sites in Turkey (Ainos), Romania (Danube Delta), Russia (Taman peninsula), Italy (Polichoro). Among her publications, there is a book on the Greek Koilè Syria (with E. Nodet, 2017), a collective book on The Library of Alexandria : a cultural crossroads of the Ancient World (with Chr. Rico, 2017) and two other volumes of Studies on the Rivers of Asia Minor (with S. Lebreton, in 2018).
Her current philological and historical teaching includes the Romance of Alexander (recensio alpha), and her ongoing research deals with the impact of Hellenic art in the ancient Central Asia.
Claude Rapin
Dr. Claude Rapin is an archaeologist and historian specialising in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. He is director emeritus of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, in the “Hellenism and Oriental civilizations” team of the UMR8546, École Normale Supérieure, and was also privat-docent for the archaeology of Central Asia at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland (1995-2019).
He began his archaeological experience with various excavations in Europe (Switzerland, at York in Great Britain and at Histria in Romania). In 1977-1979, he took part in excavations of the Greco-Bactrian city of Aï Khanoum in Afghanistan (treasury of the royal palace of Eucratides I), as a member of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) headed by Paul Bernard. Since 1989 he has been working in Uzbekistan with the Franco-Uzbek Archaeological Mission of Sogdiana. His main fieldwork focuses on Samarkand-Afrasiab (from the Achaemenid period to the Mongol invasion of Genghis Khan), Koktepe (from the early Iron Age to the first century CE), Kindikli-tepe (Kidarite castle), Yangi-rabat and Akdzhar-tepe (nomadic necropolises), Sangir-tepe near Shahr-i Sabz (a proto-Achaemenid, Achaemenid and Hellenistic temple, then a Chionite castle) and the Sogdian Iron Gates near Derbent (a Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, early medieval and Timurid frontier wall).
He has specialized in historical geography, with a particular interest in a new approach to toponymy and the route of Alexander the Great in Central Asia (from the Caspian Gates to the Indus), in Greco-Bactrian chronology and in the town planning and architecture of ancient Central Asia (mainly military and religious). His publications are linked to his fieldwork research: the first ones were devoted to Aï Khanoum, in particular its royal treasury (e.g. its Aristotelian papyrus) and Greco-Bactrian financial documents, as well Indian discoveries made in Hellenistic Bactria-Sogdiana. Recent publications have covered a wide range of topics including the periodisation of historical phases in Central Asia, particularly in Sogdiana and Bactria since the Iron Age; urban planning in Samarkand and Koktepe; irrigation and the relationship between the Samarkand plain and the steppe world; religious architecture and fortifications in Sogdiana; historical geography with studies based on Herodotus, the historians of Alexander the Great, Strabo, Ptolemy, and so on.
Olivier Bordeaux
Dr. Olivier Bordeaux is an archaeologist and numismatist, and a specialist of Central Asia focusing on the Hellenistic, Yuezhi and Kushan periods (from the 4th century BCE to the 4th century CE).
His PhD (2011-2015) dealt with the Hellenistic coinages of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms through a series of die-studies. He then was appointed Deputy Director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) between 2017 and 2019, before being recruited by the CNRS in 2020: he is currently a CNRS Research Fellow (CRCN) in the UMR 7041 laboratory Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité (“ArScAn”), in the team “Archéologie de l’Asie centrale”. Since 2021, he has been excavating in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as part of the MAFTM, MAFAC and “Bactriane” French archaeological missions.
Svetlana Gorshenina
Dr. Svetlana Gorshenina is a historian, art historian, historiographer and specialist on Central Asia, as a Research Professor, EUR’ORBEM (CNRS — CNRS/Sorbonne Université, UMR 8224, Paris). She is mainly involved in the history of Turkestan of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century and the early years of Soviet rule in the region, including geography and cartography, the history of archaeology in Central Asia, colonialism and post-colonialism, historical myths and patrimonialisation.
After a first PhD thesis completed in 1996 under the direction of Galina Pugachenkova and Valery Germanov at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, she has defended a second doctorate in 2007 at the Universities of Lausanne and Paris I-Sorbonne (under the direction of Henri-Paul Francfort and Patrick Sériot), and finally, in 2016, a habilitation on the cultural heritage of Turkestan at the Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, Paris). She has been a researcher at the Institute of Fine Arts and Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, and at the University of Tashkent. Later she has worked as a researcher and/or lecturer at the Collège de France (Frantz Grenet’s Departement, Paris), the École Normale Supérieure – ENS (“Hellenisms of Asia and Oriental Civilisations”, Paris), the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences – EHESS (Paris) and the University of Lausanne and University of Manchester (grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation). She was also Director of the “Central Asia Programme” of the Réseau Asie-IMASIE (Asia-IMASIE Network).
She has curated several exhibitions of nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs and the history of Central Asian archaeology, and co-founded the international Alert Heritage Observatory (which aims to protect Central Asian Heritage).
