February 2014

Geremie R.Barmé is a historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, translator, and web-journal editor who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early modern period (1600s) to the present. In 2016, he founded China Heritage, an online platform for the advocacy of “New Sinology.” Prior to that, he was Founding Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World and a Professor of Chinese History at The Australian National University (ANU).

Barmé is the author of Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (M.E. Sharpe, 1996), In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (Columbia University Press, 1999), The Forbidden City (Harvard University Press, 2008), and other books. His book An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975) (University of California Press, 2002) was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize for Modern China in 2004. Barmé was the Associate Director and main writer of The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary for Frontline (1995). He was also the co-director and co-producer of the documentary film Morning Sun (2003), which the American Historical Association awarded the 2004 John E. O’Conner Film Award. In 2012, he founded The China Story Project, which produces a Yearbook on contemporary China.

After graduating from ANU, where he majored in Chinese and Sanskrit, Barmé studied at universities in the People’s Republic of China from 1974 to 1977 and Japan from 1980 to 1983 and spent long periods working as a journalist, freelance writer, Chinese essayist, and translator in Hong Kong and China.

The two main projects he is working on at the moment are “Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium” and “The Tower of Reading,” both produced by China Heritage.

Geoff Dyer has worked for the Financial Times for over a decade in China, Brazil, the U.K., and now the U.S., where he writes about American foreign policy. He was the FT’s Bureau Chief in Beijing from 2008 to 2011, following three years working for the paper in Shanghai. He has also been the paper’s Brazil Bureau Chief and covered the healthcare industry.

Dyer is the author of The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China—and How America Can Win, to be published in the U.S. by Knopf in February, 2014. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, and at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna and Washington, D.C., where he was supported by a Fulbright award.

Francine Prose is the author of many bestselling books of fiction, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Prize, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her nonfiction book, Reading Like a Writer, was a New York Times bestseller. Among her 14 fiction books, her novel Household Saints was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. Another novel, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical of the same name by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, which ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the Fall of 2007. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008. A distinguished critic and essayist, Prose has taught literature for more than twenty years at major universities. She is the president of the PEN American Center board of trustees. Prose lives in New York City.

Fei Wang is a Washington, D.C.-based energy and environment professional. She is also a contributor to Tea Leaf Nation. Wang holds a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College, and graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs with a Master’s degree concentrating in energy and the environment.