Prof. Michal Biran (PhD HUJI 2000) is a historian of Inner Asia and a member of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities. She is the Max and Sophie Mydans Foundation Professor in the Humanities, teaches at the departments of Asian Studies and Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and is currently (2015) the director of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also leads the ERC-funded project “Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia.” (http://mongol.huji.ac.il/). Together with Hodong Kim she is now editing The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (2 volumes) for Cambridge University Press. She has published extensively on Mongol and PreMongol Central Asia (10th-14th centuries); the Mongol Empire; nomadism; and cross-cultural contacts between China and the Islamic world. Her books include Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (Curzon, 1997), The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2008) and Chinggis Khan (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2007). She has co-edited Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (with Reuven Amitai, Leiden: Brill, 2005) and Nomads As Agents of Cultural Change (with Reuven Amitai, Hawaii University Press, 2015).