"On the plane a stewardess gave me a bottle of champagne, which on arrival I began drinking immediately," he says. "That made the change much easier."

In 1989, Di Cosmo left Bloomington to go to Cambridge University in the U.K. as a research fellow at Clare College, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the description of nomads written in the second century BC.

"The three years I was there were very productive, not just in terms of my dissertation, but with myself. I became very interested in archaeology, and the pre-imperial period of China [before 221 BC]," he says. "I also came across new trends such as social and cultural anthropology, which I now incorporate in my research."

After England, Di Cosmo came back to the U.S., and ended up at Harvard, where he feels at home.

"The other jobs I got were really China jobs. This one was perfect for me, China and Inner Asia, my field from my undergraduate days," he says.

Here, Di Cosmo is on a mission to increase interest in Inner Asia at a time when many universities have focused in other areas.

"We have archival sources open to us not available 15 years ago. But who is going to read, say, the new Manchu documents if no one can read them?" he asks. "We are falling behind the Japanese, the Germans...we are not giving American students full history."

Di Cosmo, who also runs the East Asian Studies sophomore tutorial, says he is trying to reach out to a broader population of undergraduates, perhaps with a Foreign Cultures Core course on the history of the "Silk Road."

Di Cosmo says his research into the Inner Asian nomadic tribes have given him glimpses of a past rare in this age of transatlantic supersonic travel. He recalls a trip he made two years ago to visit Kazakh nomads in Xinjiang, the northwestern province of China.

"I was accompanied by a local high official, a very well-respected Kazakh. Once late at night, we were squatting in a circle in a yurt with the rest of the men. It was a place where there were no roads, just people moving in their yearly cycle with their camels and horses. Then the official started reciting the oral history of the Kazakhs," he says.

"For the first time, I truly understood how history was transmitted before the written word. And for that moment, time seemed to stand still."