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Dr. Guldana Salimjan is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Department. Guldana joins us from the University of British Columbia, where she completed her PhD at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice in 2018. She conducts interdisciplinary research with a focus on ethnicity, nationalism, gender, place, memory, and belonging in Chinese Central Asia. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on ethnic and gender politics in China, history and memories in Global Asia, and feminist research methods.

Her current book project focuses on the intertwined relations between gender, memory, and history under precarious political processes. Based on ethnographic analyses of Northern Xinjiang, China, Guldana tells a story of several generations of Kazakh women’s struggles against the backdrop of Mao era socialist revolution and contemporary ethnic politics in China. Guldana’s work highlights women’s experiences and their creative expressive arts and practices between contested Chinese state nationalism and Kazakh ethnonationalism, both imbued with male-centered historical and literary narratives. Her research and teaching draws on theories of settler colonialism, cultural studies, literary analysis, oral history, and ethnography as a lens to write a social history of ethnic Kazakhs’ survival and resilience through various Chinese social engineering projects carried out under the slogan of development and stability.

Guldana embeds her work deeply in the everyday gender and ethnic politics of Central Asia and aims to bring this lesser known region into discussions of Western academic feminism and Global Asia studies. Working on politically precarious places such as Xinjiang, Guldana abides feminist methodological training when exploring thorny issues of representation, ethics, and the production of knowledge. Her research has been published in the journal , , and Human Ecology. She has contributed a book chapter in , and research essays to  forum, , and . Guldana’s second project examines communal authorship of Kazakh genealogy publications as a site of knowledge production entangled in imperial anthropological theories, local histories, oral literature, and folklore. This project analyzes genealogical narratives as a kaleidoscopic lens into the interactions of power, historical representation, and cultural memory.

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