Silk Road Passages, Ancient and Modern

Lisa Ross’s journeys to capture the images found in “Living Shrines of Uyghur China” took her over routes millennia old, spanning Chinese, Persian, Indian, Tibetan and Turkic civilizations, paths along which practitioners and proselytizers of Buddhism and Manichaeism as well as Sufis have traveled. In his illustrated lecture, Professor James Millward (Georgetown University) will speak on the historical Silk Road and modern Xinjiang context of these shrines and mazars, in particular the many threads of diverse tradition and culture that underlie life among the Uyghurs today.

About the Speaker
James A. Millward is Professor of Intersocietal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of History, Georgetown University. He teaches a variety of classes on Chinese, Central Asian and world history at undergraduate and graduate levels. His research interests focus on China and Central Eurasia including Mongolia, Tibet and especially Xinjiang, as well as the silk road more generally. He has written extensively on the Qing empire, Xinjiang, the silk road, and is currently studying cross-cultural musical exchanges and working on a history of lutes across Eurasia and a book on the globalization of the guitar. He has served on the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), as well as on the Executive Board of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS). He was president of CESS in 2010.
He is the author of The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013 and Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New York: Columbia University Press; London: C. Hurst Co., 2007.