Martin Bernal

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).