Michal Biran (PhD Hebrew University 2000) is a historian of Inner Asia and a member of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities. Currently she is the director of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also leads the ERC-funded project Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia.

She has published extensively on Mongol and pre-Mongol Central Asia; the Mongol Empire; nomadism; and cross-cultural contacts between China and the Islamic world. Her books include Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (Curzon, 1997), The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2008) and Chinggis Khan (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2007). She has co-edited (with Reuven Amitai) Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden: Brill, 2005) and Eurasian Nomads As Agents of Cultural Change (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2015). Together with Hodong Kim she is now editing The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (2 volumes) as well as working on a book on The Cultural History of Ilkhanid Baghdad. She is also co-editing a volume on Universality and its Limits: Spatial Dimensions of Eurasian Empires (to be published by Cambridge University Press).