William Julian’s work concerns the changes in perceptions and portrayals of China's northwest (西北) during the Republican Period. He seeks to locate these discourses not only within broader domestic debates on borderlands, but also within their global context, examining the ways in which foreign knowledge-making practices helped to shape narratives about the situatedness of the region within Chinese history.

William graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University. He has over two years of life experience in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and comes to Harvard via Yunnan Province, where he was Communications Officer for the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences.