Dr. Mawkanuli is currently an associate teaching professor in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the director of Turkic and Central Eurasian Studies. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, as well as an affiliate of the Jackson School’s East Asia Center, Ellison Center, and Middle East Center. Prior to coming to UW, he taught at Indiana University-Bloomington and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Mawkanuli is a linguist and scholar of Turkic and sociocultural linguistics, whose work focuses on the languages in Central Eurasia and China, set within their social and cultural contexts, with special emphasis on language endangerment, minoritized languages, and ethnicity. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the region. His research and teaching are broadly interdisciplinary, covering the fields of Turkic linguistics, language documentation and description, linguistic anthropology, and the anthropology of Islam.

Dr. Mawkanuli teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on various Turkic languages, and on the societies and cultures of Central Eurasia and China. His primary research currently involves projects related to the documentation and description of Jungar Tuvan language. He is also currently working on three collaborative projects analyzing Chaghatay archival manuscript sources that illuminate Qazaq language and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.