Xinyi Wei is a current Phd student at Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department. She is broadly interested in the topic of religion, slavery, and gender, and specifically in how they intersect and shaped the medieval Central Asian slave trade. 

During her first two years at Princeton, she adopted a comparative approach examining Arabic and Chinese slave-selling contracts from the Cairo Geniza and Dunhuang documents. In her dissertation, she hopes to incorporate this method with Persian sources to reconstruct the experience of enslaved people as they moved across Eurasia.