Dr. Guldana Salimjan

Biography

Guldana Salimjan is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Department for the Study of Religion at St. George. Her research lies at the intersections of memory, colonialism, and environment, focusing on Indigenous settler knowledge production. Salimjan's current book project, 'State Dispossession: Politics of Land and Memory in the Sino-Kazakh Borderland,' utilizes archival, ethnographic, and oral history methods to examine the developmentalism and settler colonialism that shape social-ecological landscapes in China's northwestern borderland. Engaging with the historical legacies of the People's Republic of China's socialist nation-building projects, her work investigates the racialized and gendered governance of land reclamation and ecological restoration. Salimjan explores how marginalized communities endure colonialism through embodied and creative practices of place-making and history-making, highlighting Kazakh agency in telling silenced histories and commemorating ancestral spirits. Her journal articles have been published in 'Inner Asia,' 'Human Ecology,' 'Asian Ethnicity,' and 'Central Asian Survey.' Additionally, her public scholarship addresses settler colonial violence, gender, and environment, featured in anthologies and outlets such as 'Xinjiang Year Zero' and 'Los Angeles Review Books.'

Research Interests

Experience