Dr David Brophy
People_

Dr David Brophy

MA PhD Harvard
Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History
History
Phone
+61 2 9114 0778
Fax
+61 2 9351 3918
Address
A18 - Brennan MacCallum Building
The University of Sydney
Details
Websites
Dr David Brophy

I study the social and political history of China’s northwest, particularly the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its connections with the Islamic and Russian/Soviet worlds. After finishing my PhD in 2011, I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World, at the Australian National University, before coming to the University of Sydney in 2013. My first book, Uyghur Nation (2016), is on the politics of Uyghur nationalism between China and the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century. I currently hold an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship, for a project entitled “Empire and Religion in Early Modern Inner Asia,” in which am exploring Inner Asian perspectives on the rise of the Qing in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries.

  • History of Qing and Republican China
  • Early Modern Eurasia
  • Colonialism and National Movements
  • Islam (particularly Sufism) and Islamic Historiography
  • HSTY2606: China in the Nineteenth-Century World
  • CHSC6907: Modern Chinese History
  • HSTY2613: Russia’s Revolutions: 1905 to Present
  • HSTY2642: Beyond the Great Wall: China’s Frontiers
  • Honours Seminar: East Meets West: Orientalism and Eurocentrism

I am happy to supervise work on modern Chinese history, national/ethnic politics in China (particularly Xinjiang), Central Asia in the colonial and Soviet periods, and on empire in Eurasia generally.

  • The status of the Persian language in late imperial China
  • Islamic modernism in China

Selected publications

Publications

Books

  • Brophy, D. (2021). China Panic: Australia's Alternative to Paranoia and Pandering. Melbourne: La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D., Onuma, T. (2016). The Origins of Qing Xinjiang: A Set of Historical Sources on Turfan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
  • Brophy, D. (2016). Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [More Information]

Book Chapters

  • Brophy, D. (2023). The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars: An Early Modern Genocide? The Cambridge World History of Genocide, (pp. 292-311). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2019). A Lingua Franca in Decline? The Place of Persian in Qing China. In N Green (Eds.), The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, (pp. 175-191). Oakland: University of California Press.
  • Brophy, D., Thum, R. (2015). Appendix: The Shrine of Muhammad Sharif and its Qing-era Patrons. In Jeff Eden (Eds.), The Life of Muhammad Sharif: A Central Asian Sufi Hagiography in Chaghatay, (pp. 55-75). Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Journals

  • Brophy, D. (2024). The Aristocracy of Qing Xinjiang as Patrons of Islamic Letters. PMLA, 139(2), 321-328. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2020). 'He Causes a Ruckus Wherever He Goes': Said Muhammad al-Asali as a missionary of modernism in north-west China. Modern Asian Studies, 54(4), 1192-1224. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2018). Confusing black and white: Naqshbandi Sufi affiliations and the transition to qing rule in the Tarim Basin. Late Imperial China, 39(1), 29-65. [More Information]

Conferences

  • Brophy, D. (2012). Russian Muslim Writing on Xinjiang in the Pre-revolutionary Period. 2012 Summer International Symposium: From Empire to Regional Power, between State and Non-state, Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido University of Education.
  • Brophy, D. (2012). Russian Orientalism and the Turks of China. The Past and Present of Inner Asian Studies 2012, Canberra: Australian National University (ANU).
  • Brophy, D. (2012). Trade and Diplomacy on the Xinjiang Coast. Australian Centre on China in the World Seminar Series, Canberra: Australian National University (ANU).

Textual Creative Works

  • Brophy, D., Kashghari, M. (2021). In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty. (pp. 1 - 304). United States of America: Columbia University Press.

Magazine / Newspaper Articles

Reference Works

  • Brophy, D. (2018). The Uyghurs: Making a Nation. In David Ludden (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. UK: Oxford University Press.

2024

  • Brophy, D. (2024). The Aristocracy of Qing Xinjiang as Patrons of Islamic Letters. PMLA, 139(2), 321-328. [More Information]

2023

  • Brophy, D. (2023). The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars: An Early Modern Genocide? The Cambridge World History of Genocide, (pp. 292-311). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. [More Information]

2021

  • Brophy, D. (2021). China Panic: Australia's Alternative to Paranoia and Pandering. Melbourne: La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D., Kashghari, M. (2021). In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty. (pp. 1 - 304). United States of America: Columbia University Press.

2020

  • Brophy, D. (2020). 'He Causes a Ruckus Wherever He Goes': Said Muhammad al-Asali as a missionary of modernism in north-west China. Modern Asian Studies, 54(4), 1192-1224. [More Information]

2019

  • Brophy, D. (2019). A Lingua Franca in Decline? The Place of Persian in Qing China. In N Green (Eds.), The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, (pp. 175-191). Oakland: University of California Press.

2018

  • Brophy, D. (2018). Confusing black and white: Naqshbandi Sufi affiliations and the transition to qing rule in the Tarim Basin. Late Imperial China, 39(1), 29-65. [More Information]
  • Thum, R., Jacobs, J., Cliff, T., Brophy, D., Kim, K., Kobi, M. (2018). The Rise of Xinjiang Studies: A JAS New Author Forum. The Journal of Asian Studies, 77(1), 7-18. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2018). The Uyghurs: Making a Nation. In David Ludden (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. UK: Oxford University Press.

2016

  • Brophy, D. (2016). New Methods on the New Frontier: Islamic Reformism in Xinjiang, 1898-1917. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 59(1-2), 303-332. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D., Onuma, T. (2016). The Origins of Qing Xinjiang: A Set of Historical Sources on Turfan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
  • Brophy, D. (2016). Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [More Information]

2015

  • Brophy, D., Thum, R. (2015). Appendix: The Shrine of Muhammad Sharif and its Qing-era Patrons. In Jeff Eden (Eds.), The Life of Muhammad Sharif: A Central Asian Sufi Hagiography in Chaghatay, (pp. 55-75). Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
  • Brophy, D. (2015). Little Apples in Xinjiang. The China Story. [More Information]

2014

  • Brophy, D. (2014). A Tatar Turkist in Chinese Turkistan: Nushirvan Yavshef's travels in Xinjiang, 1914-1917. Studies in Travel Writing, 18(4), 345-356. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2014). High Asia and the High Qing: A Selection of Persian Letters from the Beijing Archives. In Alireza Korangy, Daniel J. Sheffield (Eds.), No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift in Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.'s 70th Birthday, (pp. 325-367). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

2013

  • Brophy, D. (2013). Correcting Transgressions in the House of Islam: Yang Zengxin's Buguozhai wendu on Xinjiang's Muslims. In N. Pianciola and P. Sartori (Eds.), Islam, Society and States Across the Qazaq Steppe (18th - Early 20th Centuries), (pp. 267-296). Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
  • Brophy, D. (2013). John Campbell, the Anti-Kim. Overland, 213, 3-9. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2013). The Junghar Mongol Legacy and the Language of Loyalty in Qing Xinjiang. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 73(2), 231-258. [More Information]

2012

  • Brophy, D. (2012). Five Races, One Parliament? Xinhai in Xinjiang and the Problem of Minority Representation in the Chinese Republic. Inner Asia, 14(2), 343-363. [More Information]
  • Brophy, D. (2012). Russian Muslim Writing on Xinjiang in the Pre-revolutionary Period. 2012 Summer International Symposium: From Empire to Regional Power, between State and Non-state, Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido University of Education.
  • Brophy, D. (2012). Russian Orientalism and the Turks of China. The Past and Present of Inner Asian Studies 2012, Canberra: Australian National University (ANU).

2011

  • Brophy, D. (2011). Governing the Uyghur huaqiao: Kashgari Aqsaqals in Russian Turkistan. 2011 Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting Joint conference, Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies.
  • Brophy, D. (2011). Mongol-Turkic language contact in eighteenth-century Xinjiang: Evidence from the Islamnama. Turkic Languages, 15(1), 51-67.
  • Brophy, D. (2011). The Language of Loyalty in Qing Xinjiang. Workshop on Beyond the Xinjiang Problem, Canberra: Australian National University (ANU).

2010

  • Brophy, D. (2010). The Qumul Rebels' Appeal to Outer Mongolia. Turcica: revue d'etudes turques: peuples, langues, cultures, etats, 42, 329-341. [More Information]

2008

  • Brophy, D. (2008). The Kings of Xinjiang: Muslim Elites and the Qing Empire. Etudes Orientales, (25).
  • Brophy, D. (2008). The Oirat in Eastern Turkistan and the Rise of Afaq Khwaja. Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, 16, 5-28.

2006

  • Brophy, D. (2006). Political Rhetoric in Eighteenth Century Xinjiang: A Fresh Look at the Tazkira-i Azizan. Central Eurasian Studies Society Seventh Annual Conference, Michigan: Central Eurasian Studies Society Seventh Annual Conference.

2005

  • Brophy, D. (2005). Taranchis, Kashgaris, and the 'Uyghur Question' in Soviet Central Asia. Inner Asia, 7(2), 163-184.

Selected Grants

2017

  • Empire and Religion in Early Modern Inner Asia, 1650-1800, Brophy D, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA)

In the media

“China: friend or foe?” on Between The Lines, ABC Radio National with Peter Hartcher and host Tom Switzer, 22 July 2021