Sigur Center for Asian Studies

homepage banner with stats on the Sigur Center's performance in the 2020-21 school year

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies strives to increase the quality and broaden the scope of scholarly research and publication on Asia, promote US-Asian scholarly interaction, and educate a new generation of students, scholars, and policymakers.

Thanks to an active program of publishing, teaching, public events, and policy engagement, the Sigur Center offers the largest Asian Studies program in metro DC, with more than 60 affiliated faculty. Together with GWIKS, Sigur supports the East Asia National Resource Center, a Title VI Center of academic excellence. Sigur also administers the prestigious Foreign Language and Area Studies awards, which funds GW students to intensively study Japanese, Korean, or Chinese.

Spotlight

Eric Schluessel

Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians.

Schluessel is currently pursuing two research projects: Saints and Sojourners explores the economic history of the Uyghur region from the 1750s through the 1950s as seen from below, through the records of merchants, farmers, and managers of pious endowments. It ties changes at the village level to shifts in the global economy in places as far away as Manchester and Tianjin. Exiled Gods 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.

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel is also completing a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year as a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.