Joshua L. Freeman
I am an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University, where my research focuses on Uyghur literature and the cultural history of twentieth-century China and Central Asia. Drawing on literary works, archival records, oral history, and other sources, my work examines the relationships between personal networks, political patronage, ideology, and literary canon in socialist states. I am particularly interested in questions of cross-border nation building and literary translation, as well as all things poetry.
Before arriving at Brown, I was an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, following three years at the Princeton Society of Fellows. I received my PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University in 2019. Prior to my doctoral studies, I lived for seven years in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an experience that deeply informs my research. In addition to working there as a translator, I completed a master’s degree in Uyghur literature at Xinjiang Normal University with a thesis on avant-garde Uyghur poetry.
Before arriving at Brown, I was an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, following three years at the Princeton Society of Fellows. I received my PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University in 2019. Prior to my doctoral studies, I lived for seven years in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an experience that deeply informs my research. In addition to working there as a translator, I completed a master’s degree in Uyghur literature at Xinjiang Normal University with a thesis on avant-garde Uyghur poetry.
In my monograph The Poetry of Power: Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, I trace the interlocking careers of a remarkable group of Uyghur literati. Between the 1930s and the end of the century, these poets, translators, editors, and officials deftly deployed the resources of socialism, nationalism, and Islam as they transformed the local culture of Ili—a small and marginalized community on the Sino-Soviet border—into the new Uyghur national culture.
As a firm believer in bringing our work beyond the academy, I have written public-facing scholarship for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement, and have translated Uyghur poetry for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and numerous literary journals. My translation of Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night (Penguin Press), received the National Book Critics Circle’s 2023 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and has formed the basis for translations into sixteen other languages.
As a firm believer in bringing our work beyond the academy, I have written public-facing scholarship for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement, and have translated Uyghur poetry for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and numerous literary journals. My translation of Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night (Penguin Press), received the National Book Critics Circle’s 2023 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and has formed the basis for translations into sixteen other languages.
