Alfrid K. Bustanov is TAIF Professor of Islamic Studies at the European University at St Petersburg, Russia. His recent publications include Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations (2015); and Islam po-russki: analiz sovremennoi islamskoi literatury v Rossii (with Michael Kemper, 2016).

Bustanov graduated with honors from the History Department at Omsk State University (2009) and twice interned at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2008, 2009). He completed his post-graduate studies and defended his doctoral dissertation on the history of Soviet oriental studies at the University of Amsterdam (2013). He has lectured at Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of a series of articles and monographs on the history of the book culture of Muslims in Siberia, as well as co-editor of a lexicon of biographies of Muslim scholars of Dagestan and a collection of articles on the Russian language as the language of Islam. Since 2005 he has participated in archaeographical, ethnographic and archaeological expeditions in Western Siberia, Southern Kazakhstan, in Dagestan, and the Volga region.