Affiliation
Assistant Professor, George Washington University, Washington, DC
Biography
Eric Schluessel is assistant professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, USA. He is a social historian of China and Central Asia. His first book, Land of Strangers, which won the 2021 John K. Fairbank Prize, is a ground-up account of what happened in Xinjiang (East Turkestan) when activists from China proper tried to convert Muslims into Confucians in the late Qing. His ongoing research concerns both Chinese and Islamic religious institutions from the eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, particularly pious endowments (waqf) and the temples of a diasporic Hunanese deity. Schluessel earned his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2016. He holds MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University and Linguistics from SOAS.
Publications related to the project’s theme
Eric Schluessel, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020
Eric Schluessel, The World as Seen from Yarkand: Ghulām Muḥammad Khān’s 1920s Chronicle Mā Tīṭayniŋ wāqiʿasi, Tokyo: NIHU Program Islamic Area Studies, 2014
Eric Schluessel, ‘Representation and the Misidentification of Economic and Ethnoreligious Conflict in Republican Xinjiang’, Asian Ethnicity 22/1 (2021), pp. 29–43
Eric Schluessel, ‘Exiled Gods: Territory, History, Empire, and a Hunanese Deity in Xinjiang’, Late Imperial China (June 2020), pp. 113–58
Eric Schluessel, ‘Hiding and Revealing Islamic Pious Endowments in Late-Qing Xinjiang’, The Muslim World 108/4 (2018), pp. 613–29
Personal URL:
https://history.columbian.gwu.edu/eric-schluessel
