Professor Dr. Talant Mawkanuli

Biography

Talant Mawkanuli is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, with a focus on Middle Eastern languages and cultures. He serves as the director of Turkic Central Eurasian Studies and is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. Mawkanuli has a PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he previously taught before joining the University of Washington. His research interests lie in Turkic sociocultural linguistics, particularly concerning the languages of Central Eurasia and China, with special emphasis on language endangerment and minoritized languages. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the region and teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on Turkic languages and the societies and cultures of Central Eurasia and China. Currently, his primary research projects focus on the documentation and description of the Jungar Tuvan language, as well as collaborative efforts analyzing Chaghatay archival manuscript sources to illuminate Qazaq language society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Research Interests