Graduate Student, History and East Asian Languages
PhD student
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Mark Elliott
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About
I am a historian of Xinjiang (East Turkestan). That means that I have two chief tasks: Firstly, I strive to illuminate lives that happened in the past, to grant some kind of immortality to people and events that have often been lost in the grand narrative of human experience. One of the best ways to do this, I think, is to radically restate some of the basic historical questions about Xinjiang, to shift our perspective both through new textual evidence and through the sometimes arbitrary application of new frameworks that lead us to different concerns. Right now, I am using texts such as Uyghur folk ballads, Qing crime reports, and Swedish mission journals to get at a social history of Xinjiang in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Secondly, I need to bring this work to bear on our understanding of humanity globally and across time. As I learned through the study of linguistics, exotic data can bring us to challenge our fundamental theoretical assumptions. Working on the history of Xinjiang requires me to reconcile a range of different textual traditions, and fitting them together means developing new methodologies. For example, I have come to focus on the historical sociology of knowledge and on everyday ritual. These interact to produce intellectual and social histories that are otherwise buried both by politics and by political history and so need to be dug piece-by-piece out of texts. I hope that the new directions I am taking will lead to new ways of thinking and writing about history and its categories of analysis.
