Elliot Sperling was one of the world's leading historians of Tibet and Tibetan-Chinese relations, and a MacArthur Fellow.
11 Facts About Elliot Sperling
2.
Elliot Sperling spent most of his scholarly career as an associate professor at Indiana University's Department of Central Eurasian Studies, with seven years as the department's chair.
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Elliot Sperling studied modern and classical Tibetan, polished his knowledge of modern and classical Chinese, and wrote his doctoral dissertation, Early Ming Policy toward Tibet: An Examination of the Proposition that the Early Ming Emperors Adopted a "Divide and Rule" Policy toward Tibet, in 1983.
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Elliot Sperling would remain at the university, a much-loved teacher, until December 2015, with occasional visiting professorships elsewhere, including Harvard University and the University of Delhi.
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Elliot Sperling wrote about bureaucrats, monks, mediators, and envoys to the Tangut, Yuan, Ming, and Qing courts, and his research covered many periods, ranging from the ninth century to the present.
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Elliot Sperling has censured the Chinese government's oppressive policies in Tibet.
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Elliot Sperling has criticized the Dalai Lama and Tibet's government-in-exile for giving up on Tibetan independence and for their ignorance of China's real positions.
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Elliot Sperling has rejected the Tibetophiles' view of Tibet as an unspoiled bastion of pure spirituality.
9.
In 2014, a festschrift in his honor, entitled Trails of the Tibetan Tradition: Papers for Elliot Sperling, was published by the Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamshala, India.
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Elliot Sperling became one of the most outspoken individual voices arguing for Ilham Tohti's innocence and release.
11.
Elliot Sperling had served on the Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad for the US Department of State, and he had testified before the Groupe d'information du Senat sur le Tibet, the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, and many others.