Emily Parker is a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). The book describes the impact of the Internet and social media in China, Cuba, and Russia.
Previously, Parker was a member of Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. While at State, she advised on issues related to Internet freedom, digital diplomacy, and open government, and traveled to the Middle East to explore the role of new media in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Parker is a founder of a U.S.-China innovation project called Green Electronics: A US-China Maker Challenge. She is also a founder of Code4Country, the first open government codeathon between the United States and Russia. She is a former International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Arthur Ross Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and Global Policy Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, where she researched the role of blogging and social media in today’s Russia.
Parker spent over five years working on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, first as an editorial writer in Hong Kong and later as an op-ed editor in New York. From 2004 to 2005, she wrote a Wall Street Journal column called “Virtual Possibilities: China and the Internet.” She was also a staff op-ed editor for The New York Times. Her chapter on Chinese nationalism appeared in China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Seven Stories Press, 2008). In 2002, she worked at the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) in Tokyo, where she researched how historical tensions between China and Japan would affect Sino-Japanese business relations.
Parker has worked in China and Japan and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish. She graduated with Honors from Brown University with a double major in International Relations and Comparative Literature (French and Spanish). She has a Masters from Harvard in East Asian Studies.
