Alexander Diener

Alexander Diener is Professor of Critical Border Studies at the Karelian Institute of University of Eastern Finland. His research focuses on borders/borderlands, migration and diaspora, nationalism/transnationalism, rural development, urban landscape change, and human territorialization/place attachment. He is the author of the Homeland Conceptions and Ethnic Integration Amongst Kazakhstan’s Germans and Koreans (Mellon Press 2004) and One Homeland or Two: The Nationalization and Transnationalization of Mongolia’s Kazakhs (Stanford University Press 2009), and co-author of Borders: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2012/2024). Professor Diener has also co-edited the books Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation State (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2010), From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities: Cultural Politics of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Identity in Eurasia (Routledge Publishers 2014), Cities as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2019), and The Power of Place in Place Attachment (Routledge Publishers 2023). Through his career, Professor Diener has been awarded fellowships that include the Regional Research Fulbright Scholar for Central Asia, a three-time Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, a Senior Fellow at George Washington University’s Elliott School, the American University of Central Asia, the Mongolian National University, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, Harvard University’s Davis Center, and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Research Center. His work has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchange Board, the American Geographical Society, the Association of American Geographers, the American Center for Mongolian Studies, the National Science Foundation, Council for American Overseas Research Centers, American Councils for International Education, Central Asian Research Network, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute. Alex is currently the Managing Editor of the international publishing platform Oxford Intersections Borders. A native of the upstate New York, Diener holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, from the University of South Carolina, and the University of Wisconsin Madison.