Professor Dawut, a tenured professor at Xinjiang University in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a distinguished expert in Uyghur folklore and the founder of the Minorities Folklore Research Center, the first center of its kind for Uyghur cultural studies. She has shared her research on international journals and books and presented her work at conferences around the world.
In December 2017, Professor Dawut informed a relative of her plans to travel from Urumqi to Beijing. Shortly afterward, she disappeared without explanation. Despite her family and friends’ attempts to locate her, her whereabouts remained unknown until August 2018, when her disappearance was publicly reported. On June 30, 2021, Xinjiang University authorities revealed that she had been sentenced to imprisonment. In September 2023, nearly six years after her disappearance, a Chinese government official confirmed that Professor Dawut had been sentenced to life in prison on charges of “endangering state security.”