Martin Bernal

on February 10, 2014

Martin Bernal was born in London in 1937. He studied at Kings College in Cambridge, and in 1959 attended Peking University. After taking his degree he did graduate work at Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard. Returning to Kings, he was elected to be a research fellow and then tutor. Opposed to the Vietnam War, he spent some months in both North and South Vietnam. In 1972, Bernal joined the Department of Government at Cornell University, where he stayed until retiring in 2001. He is the author of Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Cornell University Press, 1976), the Black Athena trilogy (Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991, and 2006), and Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics (Duke University Press, 2001).

Pico Iyer

on February 10, 2014

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Since 1986, he has been an essayist for Time magazine. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1995, for which he has written on literature, global culture, religion, China, and Tibet. He is also a contributor to The New York Times, Harper&rdsq;s Magazine, the Financial Times, and National Geographic, among others.

Iyer is the author of ten books, including The Open Road (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), an examination of the XIVth Dalai Lama that draws upon thirty-four years of talks and travels; and The Man Within My Head (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), on Graham Greene, hauntedness, and fatherhood.

Iyer studied at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. He was born in Oxford, England to parents from India and grew up in England and California. For the past twenty years, he has been based in rural Japan.

Philip Tinari

on February 10, 2014

Philip Tinari (b. 1979) is founding editor and acting publisher of LEAP, The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China, based in Beijing and launched by the Modern Media Group in February 2010. Since 2007, he has run the publishing imprint, editorial office, and translation studio Office for Discourse Engineering. Tinari is a contributing editor to Artforum and adjunct professor in the College of Humanities at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He also serves as China Representative to the leading international art fairs Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. He has written and lectured widely on contemporary art in China, for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and Dushu. A resident of Beijing for much of the past decade, he holds an A.M. in East Asian studies from Harvard, a B.A. from the Literature Program at Duke, and was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University. Tinari recently became the Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing.

Peter C. Perdue

on February 10, 2014

Peter C. Perdue is a Professor of History at Yale University. He has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Perdue’s first book, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 A.D. (Harvard University Press, 1987), examined long-term agricultural change in one Chinese province. His book, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005), discusses environmental change, ethnicity, long-term economic change, and military conquest in an integrated account of the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian contention over Siberia and Central Eurasia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perdue is a co-editor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire (Routledge, 2008), and a co-author of several handbooks on world history. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers and Chinese environmental history.

Mark Leong

on February 10, 2014

Mark Leong is a fifth-generation Chinese-American from Sunnyvale, California. After graduating from Harvard University in 1988, he received a George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship to visit China for the first time, where he spent a year traveling around the country taking pictures. He returned to China in 1992 as an artist-in-residence at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, sponsored by a fellowship from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and in 1997 made his long-term home in Beijing, where he has lived since.

In 2003, Leong joined the Redux Pictures photo agency. A book of his black and white work, China Obscura, was published in 2004. He is a contributing photographer for National Geographic and his photographs have appeared in TIME, Fortune, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, GQ, and Stern. His work has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fifty Crows, and the Overseas Press Club. In 2010, he was named the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year for his regional coverage of the Asian wildlife trade.

Peter Conn

on February 10, 2014

Peter Conn is Professor of English and Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the Vartan Gregorian Chair in English and is also an affiliated member of the Center for East Asian Studies. Among his publications, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, 1996; Paperback 1998), was chosen as a “New York Times Notable Book,” was listed among the best 25 books of 1996 by Publishers Weekly and among the best books of the year by Library Journal, was included among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, and received the Athenaeum Award.

Conn's books and chapters have been translated into eight foreign languages and he has lectured at numerous universities in America and internationally. He has written on international adoption, the job market in the humanities, and American universities' relationships with China. A John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Conn has directed National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminars for college and high school teachers and was the recipient of an NEH Humanities Focus grant. He has received several awards for distinguished teaching. Conn has served as literary consultant on numerous television projects, including as principal literary advisor to “Oprah's Book Club” for The Good Earth. In 2009, The Teaching Company released Conn's video course on “American Best Sellers.” Since 1993, Conn has served as visiting professor at the University of Nanjing, in the People's Republic of China. He has been appointed a Fulbright Specialist scholar. In 2011, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Conn lectured for several weeks in West China on topics in American studies.

Perry Link

on February 10, 2014

Perry Link is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside. He has published widely on modern Chinese language, literature, and popular thought, and is a member of the Princeton China Initiative, Human Rights Watch/Asia, and other groups that support human rights. He has authored, among others, the books The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (Norton and Co., 1992); coauthored Chinese course books; and edited several books including Two Kinds of Truth: Stories and Reportage from China by Liu Binyan (Indiana University Press, 2006). He coedited, with Andrew J. Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People—In Their Own Words by Zhang Liang (Public Affairs Press, 2001). His published essays include “Corruption and Indignation: Windows into Popular Chinese Views of Right and Wrong” for the American Enterprise Institute’s De Tocqueville on China project in 2007, and “Whose Assumptions Does Xu Bing Upset, and Why?” in Persistence and Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing (Princeton University Press, 2006). His latest book is An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard , 2013).

Michael Kulma

on February 10, 2014

Michael G. Kulma is the Executive Director of Global Leadership Initiatives at Asia Society’s headquarters in New York. In this capacity, he directs the Society’s four major leadership initiatives: Asia 21 Young Leaders, the Diversity Leadership Forum, the Williamsburg Conference, and Women Leaders of New Asia. He began his career at the Asia Society in 2000, working on policy issues related to Northeast Asia, with a specific concentration on China. Prior to that, he lectured at a number of colleges in the New York City area, focusing on East Asian politics, foreign policy, and international relations.

Kulma contributes regularly to print and broadcast media on Asia-focused issues. He was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of The National Committee on United States-China Relations. He received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago, a Master's in Public and International Affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the City University of New York. He speaks Mandarin Chinese.

Mark Frazier

on February 10, 2014

Mark W. Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and Co-Director of the India China Institute at The New School (New York City). His research interests include labor and social policy in China, and the politics of citizenship and urban protest in China and India. He is the author of The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Other publications include Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010) and The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002).