Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is a writer and historian of modern China. She is a graduate of Saint Joseph’s University (B.A., 2004), Yale University (M.A., 2006), the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies (graduate certificate, 2008), and the University of California, Irvine (Ph.D., 2014), as well as Chinese language programs in Beijing and Hangzhou. She is now working on the manuscript for a book about children’s cartoonist Zhang Leping.
Cunningham was the Editor-in-Chief of The China Beat, a blog based at UC Irvine, between 2009 and 2012, and Associate Editor of ChinaFile during a fellowship at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in 2011-2012. From 2014 to 2016, Maura served as a Program Officer at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, where she co-directed the Public Intellectuals Program; in 2016, she became the Digital Media Manager at the Association for Asian Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a writer, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. She is the co-author (with Jeffrey Wasserstrom) of the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
