Elise Anderson

Dr. Elise Anderson is a practitioner and scholar whose work focuses on Uyghur and other "minority" communities both within the People's Republic of China and in diaspora. She currently works full time at Freedom House in Washington, D.C. and serves as a nonresident senior fellow at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. Dr. Anderson previously worked in human rights and rule of law research, research-based advocacy, academic grant-writing, university teaching, and editing. She is widely recognized as an expert on Uyghur issues, having spent nearly the past two decades in close engagement and study on the topic, including a long stint living and conducting doctoral research in the Uyghur Region from 2012 to 2016.

She has given dozens of talks and lectures at universities and other institutions, testified before the Canadian House of Commons and Uyghur Tribunal, and interpreted between Uyghur and English before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Her commentary on the Uyghur crisis has appeared in a number of major media outlets, and her research has been published in both scholarly and public-facing journals. She is also a trained vocalist, musician, and dancer who has formally studied classic Uyghur music (among other idioms). She earned dual Ph.D. degrees in Central Eurasian Studies and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University-Bloomington. She is an alumna of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program (China, 2012–13) and Fulbright-Hays (China and Sweden, 2013–14) and was a National Finalist for the White House Fellowship in 2022.