Kahar Barat is an Uyghur

Uyghur people

The Uyghur are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia. Today, Uyghurs live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China...

-American historian, known for his work on Buddhism and Islam in Xinjiang

Xinjiang

Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...

.

Kahar Barat was born in Yili

Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture

Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture , in northernmost Xinjiang, is the only Kazakh autonomous prefecture of the People's Republic of China.-Geography and coordinates:The following figures excludes both Tacheng Prefecture and Altay Prefecture....

 in 1950.
He earned his M.A. degree in Turkology

Turkology

Turkology is a complex of humanities sciences studying languages, history, literature, folklore, culture, and ethnology of people speaking Turkic languages and Turkic peoples in chronological and comparative context...

 from the Central University for Ethnic Minorities (Minzu University of China) in Beijing; he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1993.

He later taught at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 and other institutions.

In 2000, Kahar Barat published an annotated English edition of parts of "The Uygur-Turkic

Chagatai language

The Chagatai language is an extinct Turkic language which was once widely spoken in Central Asia, and remained the shared literary language there until the early twentieth century...

 biography of the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist Pilgrim Xuanzang

Xuanzang

Xuanzang was a famous Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator who described the interaction between China and India in the early Tang period...

".

Barat's recent book, named Maymaq Uyghurlar ("Warped Uyghurs", in Uyghur) discusses the plight of Xinjiang's artists, who find themselves in the position of packaging the Uyghur culture for consumption by outside audiences.