Uyghurs in China: Historical Context
Darren Byler
Darren Byler received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington in 2018. His research focuses on Uyghur dispossession, culture work and "terror capitalism" in the city of Ürümchi, the capital of Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). He has published research articles in the Asia-Pacific Journal, Contemporary Islam, Central Asian Survey, the Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art and contributed essays to volumes on ethnography of Islam in China, transnational Chinese cinema and travel and representation. He has provided expert testimony on Uyghur human rights issues before the Canadian House of Commons and writes a regular column on these issues for SupChina. In addition, he has published Uyghur-English literary translations (with Mutellip Enwer) in Guernica and Paper Republic. He also writes and curates the digital humanities art and politics repository The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which is hosted at livingotherwise.com.
Rian Thum
Rian Thum’s research and teaching are generally concerned with the overlap of China and the Muslim World. His book, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press, 2014) argues that the Uyghurs - and their place in China today - can only be understood in the light of longstanding traditions of local pilgrimage and manuscript culture. The study uses manuscripts in Chaghatay and Persian, contemporary Uyghur novels, graffiti, and ethnographic fieldwork to uncover a complex of historical practices that offer new perspectives on what history is and how it works. The book was awarded the 2015 Fairbank prize for East Asian history (American Historical Association), the 2015 Hsu prize for East Asian Anthropology (Society for East Asian Anthropology, American Anthropological Association), and the 2015 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award. Thum’s current book project, Islamic China, is a re-examination of Chinese Islam that takes full account of the numerous Persian and Arabic sources that Chinese Muslims have used and written. It re-evaluates Chinese-language Islamic traditions in light of their multilingual contexts and uncovers the role of Persianate Islamic networks in binding China and India together over the last 400 years. More generally, his research interests include historical anthropology, mobility, orality and writing, historiography, the history of money, and the place of non-Han peoples in China.
Magnus Fiskesjo
Magnus Fiskesjö was educated in his native Sweden, and at the University of Chicago, where he received a joint PhD in Anthropology and in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, in 2000. Earlier he served in the Swedish embassies in Beijing and in Tokyo; in 2000-2005 he was director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, in Stockholm, Sweden. Since 2005, he teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University. His research includes ethnic politics and history, as well as cultural heritage issues, in East and Southeast Asia.
Louisa Greve
Louisa Greve is the Director of Global Advocacy for the Uyghur Human Rights Project. Previously, Ms. Greve was Vice President for Programs and East Asia Director at the National Endowment for Democracy ,with past experience at Special Olympics International, the Corporation for National and Community Serviice, and the United Nations Development Program. She is an experienced non-profit advisor and an exper on human rights in China, having traveled and worked in China since 1980. Her first visit to East Turkistan was in 1988. She currently also serves as a Washington Fellow for CSW, an advocacy group romoting freedom of religion or belief for all peoples and faiths. Ms. Greve has served on the Amnesty International USA board of directors, the Virginia Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the International Advisory Committee of the Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, and the Liberty's Promise board of directors. She is the author of several book chapters on ethnic issues and human rights in China, and she has testified before Congress on democracy in Asia.