Yuri Enohovich Bregel was born on November 13, 1925, and died on August 7, 2016.
He was one of the world’s leading historians of Islamic Central Asia.
Yuri published extensively on Persian- and Turkic-language history and historiography, and on political, economic and ethnic history in Central Asia and the Muslim world.
During the 1960s and early ’70s, Yuri Bregel’s scholarship had already gained considerable reputation, having worked on the 10-volume collection and republication of Vasily Bartold’s works; on the production of the famed Monuments of the Literature of the East (Pamiatniki pis’mennosti Vostoka) series and the Russian translation and significant expansion of Charles Storey’s essential, multi-volume Persian Literature.
Putting out his best, Bregel added original scholarship on political, economic and ethnic history of 19th-century Khiva and its Turkmen peoples.
He was appointed as the Director of Indiana University’s Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies from 1986 to 1997, and as Director of Indiana University’s Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center from 1989 to 1997.
Yuri served as consulting editor for the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, senior editor for the Oriental Literature Public House in Moscow, a research fellow at the Institute for Oriental Studies Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a member of the Association for the Advancement of Central Asian Research and the Association for Central Asian Studies.
Yuri has authored numerous publications on the medieval and early modern history of Central Asia, including the 3-volume Bibliography of Islamic Central Asia (1995), the edition and translation of the important Khivan chronicle Firdaws al-iqbal (1988 and 1999) and An Historical Atlas of Central Asia (2003), in addition to serving as editor-in-chief of Papers on Inner Asia and many other publications.
Yuri Bregel passed away at 90 years old.