ALEXANDER DIENER, diener@ku.edu

Alexander Diener is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas. He is the author of One Homeland or Two?: Nationalization and Transnationalization of Mongolia’s Kazakhs (Stan ford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press 2009) and Homeland Conceptions and Ethnic Integration among Kazakhstan's Germans and Koreans (Mellen Press 2004). He is the co-author of Borders: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press forthcoming 2012) and co-editor of Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Nation’s Edge (Rowman & Littlefield 2010) and a special issue of Nationalities Papers entitled Urban Issues in Post-Communist Contexts (2012).

Professor Diener has held research fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, at the Institute for European, Russian, Eurasian Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. During 2011-2012, he was a Regional Research Fulbright Scholar in Central and South Asia. Professor Diener’s interests include Migration; Transnationalism; Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Development; Political and Cultural Geography of Islam; Urban Landscape Change; and the Political and Moral Consequences of Territorialization. His articles have been published in a variety of disciplinary and area studies journals, as well as various edited volumes.