Bio:
Rebecca Clothey, PhD, has been a faculty member at Drexel University since 2006. Her vast international experience started in India, where she attended an international school as a youth. Prior to moving to Philadelphia, she lived in China for five years where she was based at various higher education institutions throughout the country.
Clothey’s current research on maintenance and transmission of Uyghur culture spans several countries, including China, the US, and Turkey, where she was a visiting scholar in 2018-19. Uyghurs are an ethnic group indigenous to China’s northwestern-most Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where she was a visiting scholar in the fall of 2014.
Prior to completing her PhD she was also seconded by the US State Department to conduct elections training for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE): Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. She has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships for her research, one to China and one to Uzbekistan, a Spencer Fellowship to study community-based schools in Argentina (with Kai Heidemann of Maastricht University in the Netherlands), and an ARIT-NEH Fellowship to study cultural transmission among the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey. She has a PhD in Administrative and Policy Studies from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.