February 2014

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.  His most recent books, both published in 2016, are, as author, Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin), and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (Oxford).  An Associate Fellow of the Asia Society who belongs to and has served on the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, he is Editor of The Journal of Asian Studies, Advising Editor for Asia for The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a member of Dissent magazine’s Editorial Board. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in many general interest periodicals, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Internazionale, TIME, Slate, The American Scholar, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently writing a book about the Boxer Uprising and the invasion by armies marching under eight different flags that crushed it, while also collaborating with Maura Cunningham on a third edition of the primer China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He also directs Free Speech Debate, a multilingual Oxford University project on global free expression in the internet age. His essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books and he writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He is the author of nine books of political writing which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years. His most recent book is Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name (Yale University Press, 2009).

Teng Biao is an academic lawyer, currently the Hauser Human Rights Scholar at Hunter College and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was a lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing and a visiting scholar at Yale, Harvard, New York University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Teng’s research focuses on criminal justice, human rights, social movements, and political transition in China. He defended cases involving freedom of expression, religious freedom, the death penalty, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. He co-founded two human rights NGOs in Beijing, the Open Constitution Initiative and China Against the Death Penalty, in 2003 and 2010, respectively. He is one of the earliest promoters of the Rights Defense Movement in China and the manifesto Charter 08, for which Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Teng has received various international human rights awards including the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic (2007) and the National Endowment for Democracy’s Democracy Award (2008). He is completing two books on the human rights movement in China and on transnational repression.

James Silk is Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he directs the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. He is also Executive Director of the Law School’s Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. He was formerly the Director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights in Washington, D.C. After completing law school, he was an Attorney at the Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter, where his pro bono work included representing a Virginia death-row inmate in his appeals. Before attending law school, Silk was Editor, Policy Analyst, and Senior Writer for the U.S. Committee for Refugees. He has taught English in Shanghai, China. Silk has a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a J.D. from Yale.