Dru C. Gladney

Dru C. Gladney is Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and recent President of the Pacific Basin Institute. Dr. Gladney has served as the inaugural Dean of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a Non-resident Senior Scholar at the 21st Century China Institute at the University of California, San Diego.

In addition to a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle, Dr. Gladney has three M.A. degrees in religion, philosophy, and anthropology. He has also held faculty positions and post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, the University of Hawai’i, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Professor Gladney taught Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa for over a decade, while serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the East-West Center. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he has twice been awarded Fulbright Fellowships to Turkey and China, and has held faculty positions and post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Southern California, Kings College, Cambridge, the Max Planck Institute, Peking and Fudan Universities, Minzu University in Beijing, the National University of Singapore, and Bosphorus University, Istanbul. Dr. Gladney began his field research in Western China over 30 years ago, and has carried out more recent projects on China’s “New Silk Road” in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Dr. Gladney has testified to the US Congress and Senate on four separate occasions, and twice to the European Parliament, regarding his research on religious policy and cultural nationalism in Asia, focusing on issues of religion, identity, economy, nation-state formation, transnationalism, and political development. He has served as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, the Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation, the World Bank, UNESCO, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Museum, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the National Academy of Sciences. Research languages include Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, Uyghur, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian. He is a frequent commentator on CNN, Al-Jazeera, the BBC and NPR. A World Economic Council member for several years, he served on the Global Agenda Council on Human Equality and Respect in Dubai, helping to shape the Davos Agenda.

Author of the award-winning book, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic (Harvard University Press, 2nd edition) as well as three more recent books: Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality (Harcourt Brace); Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the U.S. (Editor, Stanford University Press); and Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Sub-Altern Subjects (University of Chicago Press), Gladney has published over 100 academic articles in books and journals, including The Journal of Asian Studies; Current History; Public Culture; Cultural Survival Quarterly; Central Asian Survey; Inner Asia; History and Anthropology; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs; The International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies; and the China Quarterly. His research has been regularly featured in the New York Times, the Economist, Newsweek, Time, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Opinion-Editorial articles have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. One of the leading Western scholars on cultural politics and religious minorities on the Silk Road, Professor Gladney is currently engaged in a new research project on China’s important “Belt and Road Initiative.” Interested in China since first visiting Hong Kong as a High School student sent by his church in Pomona, CA, he taught English as a summer volunteer. In 2019-20, Gladney conducted research in Hainan Island and Kunming, Yunnan, where he is researching social memory and the World War II era Flying Tigers, which included his father, Capt. B. Curtis Gladney (1917-2006), who was a Hump Flyer, and inspired his son’s earliest interest in China’s frontier regions.