People at the Mongolian Research Lab

Dr. Dr. Alevtina Solovyeva specialises in comparative Asian studies, Chinese and Mongolian studies, folkloristics, historical and social anthropology, and social sciences. She obtained her first PhD in Asian studies (2016) and the second in Folkloristics (2021). She undertook her postdoctoral research at the Faculty of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2022). She has been conducting fieldwork research for various projects in Mongolia, China, and other regions of Inner, Central, and East Asia annually since 2006.

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Axel Jagau is a visiting researcher at the Mongolian Research Lab of Tartu University. His main research interests include the history and cultural history of Mongolia in the first half of the 20th century, the history of the Mongolian language with a particular focus on its written standard, and the documentation of early contacts between Mongolia and Western scholars and explorers. He also works on European minority languages, especially Sorbian, which is also the subject of his 2026 doctoral dissertation. He studied at Tartu University (Estonian and Finno-Ugric philology) and the University of Hamburg (Finno-Ugric philology, Indo-European studies, and Modern Greek/Byzantine philology).

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Mari Valdur is a visiting scholar at the Lab. She is a social anthropologist who defended her PhD thesis 'Life and Abortion: The Post-Biopolitics of Reproductive Health in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia' at the University of Helsinki in 2020. After her doctoral studies she took up a short visiting scholarship at the University of Cambridge; a visiting lectureship at Tallinn University; and a one-year postdoctoral project funded by the Estonian Research Council at Tallinn University and the University of Tartu. More recently she has been a senior guest lecturer at Riga Stradins University (teaching a MA course Anthropology of East Asia).

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Yanjinlkham Dashtseren is a visiting scholar at the Lab. She has a MA degree in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage from the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu. She is interested in the Buriad, a minority ethnic group in Mongolia. Being Buriad herself, her Master's thesis is likely to address the topic of post-memory of forced migration of the Buriad that took place in the early 20th century. She has a Bachelor's degree in computer sciences from the National University of Mongolia (2008), and extensive work experience as an IT coordinator and general manager at international companies.

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Tuya Shagdar is an anthropologist working in Mongolia. Her research focuses on the emergent political forms, legacies of state socialism, and Mongolian Buddhism. She recently defended her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge with a dissertation focusing on postsocialist transformations through the method of studying up. Tuya also holds a degree in comparative literature which enabled her to teach courses in literary theory and film studies at the National University of Mongolia. She speaks Mongolian, Russian, and English in addition to basic knowledge of Japanese and French.

Tobias Jones is a scholar working on the Mongol Empire, largely from the point of view of the Middle East. Dr Jones completed his Bachelor’s degree in 2011 at the University of St Andrews in the UK, in the field of Mediaeval History. He then moved to the Netherlands, where he completed a Research Master’s programme at Leiden University. In this programme, he began learning Persian, and wrote his Master’s thesis on the idea of the ‘Pax Mongolica’. He continued on to a PhD at Leiden, which was completed in January 2023, focusing on Chinggisid loyalty networks and how they were adapted by the successor state in Iran, the Ilkhanate. He is currently a lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University.

Kenneth's research is on Mongolian environmental and animal history, and his PhD dissertation (Indiana University, Bloomington, PhD in Central Eurasian Studies with a History Minor, 2022) was on the socialist transformation of animal and environmental relations through collectivization. Kenneth has published a few articles on this topic, from the history of wolf hunting to a translation of a socialist-era short story about collective herders. During the remote visiting fellowship he was finishing a history of Mongolian human-animal relations, and working on a conference presentation entitled Humans as Animals and Animals as Humans in the Mongol Empire. He is currently employed at the Administrative Assistant and Advisor for the Rutgers University History Undergraduate program.