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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.

When Guldana is not researching and writing, she likes to walk on Vancouver’s beaches, watch sci-fi movies, do push-ups, find time to travel, and try new recipes.