Professional Affiliation
Professor, Penn State University
Expert Bio
A historian of 19th and 20th China, Tibet and Islam in Asia, Dr. Atwill’s work examines the complex intersection of ethnicity, religion and politics. He has carried out oral and archival research across three continents in five languages, and has received fellowships from Fulbright, Mellon and the NEH. He was a fellow in the National Committee of US-China Relations’ Public Intellectual Program. His most recent monograph is Islamic Shangri-la: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600-1960 (2018).
Wilson Center Project
In China’s Shadow: The Ascendancy of High Asia, 1900-1965
Project Summary
Between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the High Asian states of Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia experienced a half-century of near complete self-rule. With an extraordinary cast of 20th century state leaders, regional warlords and religious figures, The Ascendency of High Asia captures the rarely understood 50-year window of ethno-religious, ideological and territorial self-determinism in an era when Chinese political power was at a low ebb. Given High Asia’s centrality to the emergent Soviet, Indian and Chinese geo-political concerns, the world’s top international leaders – Stalin and Nehru to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong – all made historical, political or ideological claims to the region that still shape the events of Asia – yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Major Publications
Islamic Shangri-la: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600-1960 (University of California Press, 2018).
“Boundaries of Belonging: Sino-Indian Relations and the 1960 Tibetan Muslim Incident,” Journal of Asian Studies 75(3) August 2016: 595-620.
“A Tibetan By Any Other Name: The Case of Muslim Tibetans and Ambiguous Ethno-religious Identities” Cahiers d’Extrême Asie 23: 31-61.
