Sean R. Roberts

Sean R. Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is an anthropologist specializing in Central Asia, having earned his MA degree in Visual Anthropology (1996) and his PhD in Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the University of Southern California. Most of his ethnographic research has focused on the Uyghur people of Central Asia and China, whom he has been studying since 1990. Roberts has made a documentary on the Uyghurs of the China-Kazakhstan borderlands (Waiting for Uyghurstan, 1996) and is the author of numerous academic articles and book chapters on the Uyghur people. Additionally, he has done development work in Central Asia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union on issues related to human rights and governance and is the author of numerous assessments and evaluations of development projects. He also frequently writes on issues related to society, culture, and politics in the former Soviet states of Central Asia. He hails from Buffalo, NY, which he still considers his homeland, but he lived for nearly a decade in Central Asia during the 1990s and early 2000s and has lived in Washington, DC since 2006. Roberts speaks and reads Russian, Uyghur, and Uzbek languages and is a hockey goalie and a juggler. You can learn more about all of his work at www.seanrroberts.com.