Denis V. Volkov is Leading Research Fellow and Associate Professor at National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow). He is also Head of the Centre for the Study of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Volkov received his PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. He also spent fifteen years in Iran, working in the field of interstate economic cooperation between Russia and Iran. His research interests include the history and the present of Russo-Iranian relations, intellectual history, Russia’s Iranian Studies, and, particularly, Russian émigré ‘Iranists’ in Europe and the broader Persianate World. His most recent publications are Russia’s Turn to Persia: Orientalism in Diplomacy and Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2018), “Vladimir Minorsky (1877– 1966) and the Iran– Iraq War (1980– 1988), or The Centenary of ‘Minorsky’s Frontier’,” in Russians in Iran: Diplomacy and Power in Iran in the Qajar Era and Beyond (IRI Embassy in London Prize ‘Book of the Year’), ed. Rudi Matthee and Elena Andreeva, and “War and Peace in the Other and the Self: Iran through the eyes of Russian spies” Studia Iranica 62 (2018): 225– 60.