Eric Schluessel is an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University, specializing in China, Central Asia, social history, and imperialism. He is a social historian of China and Central Asia, with a particular focus on Xinjiang in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Schluessel’s first monograph, “Land of Strangers,” uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to examine the implications of a project in the last decades of the Qing empire that aimed to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians.
Currently, Schluessel is pursuing two research projects: “Saints and Sojourners,” which explores the economic history of the Uyghur region from the 1750s through the 1950s, through the records of merchants, farmers, and managers of pious endowments, and “Exiled Gods,” which delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire.
Schluessel has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies to complete a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.