This workshop focused on Link-Cotsen postdoctoral fellow Joshua L. Freeman’s book manuscript, "Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China." Integrating cultural, literary, and political history, Freeman’s work explores the role of socialist policy, mass printing, and literary creativity in the development of modern Uyghur culture and identity. In particular, the manuscript demonstrates that Uyghurs writers from Ili, a region on the Sino-Soviet frontier, leveraged socialist cultural policy to reinvent their local culture as the new Uyghur national culture. The manuscript draws on archival, published, and oral sources in Uyghur, Chinese, and Russian.

Workshop attendees included Gail Hershatter (University of California, Santa Cruz), Adeeb Khalid (Carleton College), and Denise Ho (Yale University).