Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor and Director at the George Washington University

Expert Bio

Eric Schluessel is an associate professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. He specializes in the social history of China and Central Asia. Schluessel’s first monograph, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia won the 2021 Fairbank Prize for East Asian History. He is also the translator of the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi, a celebrated Uyghur chronicle. He received a PhD from Harvard University, and his work has since been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study. Schluessel consults frequently with the news media and is a current Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Wilson Center Project

Violence and Resilience: Xinjiang at the Grassroots

Project Summary

This project is a study of how ordinary people in the Uyghur homeland have organized and mobilized for resistance and violence at the grassroots level. Reading official sources against the grain can reveal continuity and change in historically resilient modes of organization, as well as shifts in narratives of legitimate violence, since the founding of the PRC and through the present day. The goal is to challenge macro-level analyses of conflict in Xinjiang that emphasize modern identity conflicts and replace them with nuanced sub-regional accounts of networks of loyalty that have persisted across time.