Morgan Y. Liu is a cultural anthropologist studying the globalization of financial and economic elites in Central Eurasia; Islamic ideas of social justice in former socialist states; the agency and emergent complexity of informal social networks, corporations, states, and non-state actors.  His broadest interests concern how Central Eurasians make sense of and act on their society’s structural problems. This includes turning an ethnographic lens onto the dependencies between elites in Central Asia, Turkey, Russia, and China.

He is Chair of Near Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures, and Associate Professor in Anthropology at The Ohio State University.

Before coming to Ohio State, he was a postdoc at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. His Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan in Anthropology.