David Brophy

History of Qing and Republican China; Early Modern Eurasia Colonialism and National Movements; Islam (particularly Sufism) and Islamic Historiography

David Brophy is an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and a Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney. He studies the social and political history of China’s northwest, particularly Xinjiang, and its connections with the Islamic and Russian/Soviet worlds. After finishing his PhD at Harvard in 2011, Professor Brophy spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World, at the Australian National University. His book Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) is about the politics of Uyghur nationalism between Xinjiang and the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century. Most of Professor Brophy’s new research engages with the Manchu-language archive on Qing China’s eighteenth-century expansion.