Johan Elverskog is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, a professor of religious studies, and, by courtesy, a professor of history, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author and editor of eleven books and numerous articles focused on the history of Eurasia, including the award-winning Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road, written while he was a Fellow at SCAS in 2007–2008. More recently, he has published The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (2020), The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty (2023) and A History of Uyghur Buddhism (2024).

Elverskog’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Research Foundation, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, the James P. Geiss & Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation, the Robert H. N. Ho Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. He has also been a residential fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Centrum für Religionswissenschaftliche Studien at Ruhr Universität Bochum, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, and the National Humanities Center.

While at SCAS, he will work on his book project The Fathers and Sons of Chinggis Khan, which shifts the historiographical framing of Mongol history both temporally and spatially to provide a truly comprehensive and synthetic history of the Mongols and their role in shaping Eurasian history for more than a thousand years.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.