Daniel Waugh

Daniel Waugh is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Washington, with appointments in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He received a B.A. in Physics from Yale University in 1963, an A.M. in Regional Studies--Soviet Union from Harvard University in 1965, and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1972. His academic interests include the archaeology of Eurasia, Central Asia, early imperial Russia, Muscovy, Peter the Great, the Russian Empire, Silk Roads, pre-modern Eurasian exchange, medieval Russia, early modern Europe, and the Middle East. Waugh chaired the Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies Program in the Jackson School from 1991 to 1996 and directed the U.S. Department of Education Title VI Center for those studies from 1994 to 1996. Although retired from teaching since 2006, he remains active in research, writing, and lecturing on pre-modern Russia and Central Asia, particularly the historic Silk Roads.

Waugh initiated and directed Silk Road Seattle, an educational website whose resources are used in classrooms worldwide. He edited the Silk Road journal for the Silkroad Foundation since 2003 and contributed major collections of Silk Roads photographs to Archnet and HEIR databases. Notable publications include The Great Turkes Defiance: On the History of the Apocryphal Correspondence of the Ottoman Sultan in its Muscovite and Russian Variants (Slavica Publishers, 1978), Essays in Honor of A.A. Zimin (editor, Slavica, 1985), Civil Society in Central Asia (co-editor, University of Washington Press, 1999), Istoriia odnoi knigi (Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), Cross-Cultural Communication in Early Modern Russia: Foreign News in Context (co-author with Ingrid Maier, 2023), and Skrine at Kashgar: Life, Exploration and Intrigue at an Outpost of Empire (editor, recent open-access). He received a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship in 2010 for Silk Road site studies in the Middle East. Waugh participated in archaeological excavations in Mongolia, study programs at Mogao Caves in China, and delivered lectures such as The Silk Roads: 2000 Years of Cultural and Economic Exchange (2009 keynote).

Professional Email: dwaugh@uw.edu