Andrew Wachtel

Andrew Wachtel has been working in the Higher Education sphere for more than 40 years. He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature from UC, Berkeley. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, he was the director of the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies and served as the Dean of The Graduate School at Northwestern University between 2002 and 2010. From 2010 until 2018 he was President of the American University of Central Asia (Bishkek) and from 2018 until 2020 he served as the Rector of Narxoz University (Almaty). In 2020 he became a co-founder and the Director of Compass College of Art and Design in Bishkek.
Wachtel is the author of more than 10 books and 100 academic articles on a wide range of subjects from Russian literature and culture to East European and Balkan culture, history, and politics to contemporary Central Asia. His most cited books are Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford University Press, 1998 (the book was translated into Romanian, Serbian and Slovene) and The Balkans in World History. Oxford University Press, 2008 (translated into Albanian, Greek, Italian and Turkish). He also works as a translator from multiple Slavic languages and has consulted on educational projects throughout Eurasia.