After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999, she spent one year at Harvard University on a post-doctoral fellowship before taking up her current position. Edgar is the author of Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton University Press, 2004), and a number of articles. Her current project is titled, “Marriage, Modernity, and the Friendship of Nations: Interethnic Marriage in Soviet Central Asia.”