Paul A. Cohen
Paul A. Cohen began his career at the University of Michigan and Amherst College. He then taught for thirty-five years at Wellesley College, where he is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History, Emeritus. He is also a long-time Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Cohen has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. His books include Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (1984) and History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997), both published by Columbia University Press. History in Three Keys was the winner of the 1997 New England Historical Association Book Award and the American Historical Association’s 1997 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Cohen’s most recent publication is Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (University of California Press, 2009). His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. He is currently writing a book about the range of ways in which specific stories speak meaningfully to specific historical circumstances in different cultures (including so far China, the USSR, Great Britain, Israel, and Serbia).
Merle Goldman
Merle Goldman, Professor Emerita of Chinese History at Boston University and Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies of Harvard, is the author of a number of books on modern Chinese history and culture. Two of her books, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (1981) and Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (1994), were selected by The New York Times Book Review as notable books in their respective years. The latter book was also selected by the American Association of Publishers, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, as the best book on government published in 1994. She is co-author of updated editions of China: A New History (with John K. Fairbank, 1998, 2006), and her latest book is From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China.
William Kirby
William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Chairman of the Harvard China Fund. A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby’s work examines China’s business, economic, and political development in an international context. He has written on the evolution of modern Chinese business (state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; relations across the Taiwan Strait; and China’s relations with Europe and America. His current projects include case studies of contemporary Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States.
Michael Szonyi
Michael Szonyi, Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University, received his BA from the University of Toronto and his D.Phil from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has also studied at National Taiwan University and Xiamen University. Prior to coming to Harvard in 2005, Prof. Szonyi taught at McGill University and University of Toronto. His main research interests are the local history of southeast China, especially in the Ming dynasty; the history of Chinese popular religion, and Overseas Chinese history. His most recent book is Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line, published in 2008. A description of the book appeared recently in the Harvard Gazette.
Roderick MacFarquhar
Roderick MacFarquhar is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science and formerly Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, The Sino-Soviet Dispute, China under Mao; Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971; The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao; the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank); The Politics of China 2nd Ed: The Eras of Mao and Deng; and a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He was the founding editor of “The China Quarterly, and has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In previous personae, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of Parliament. His most recent, jointly-authored book on the Cultural Revolution entitled Mao’s Last Revolution was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2006.
Arthur Waldron
Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His specialties are the history of China and Eurasia, and the history of war and violence. At Penn he is an associate of ISTAR—the Institute for Strategic Threat Assessment and Response—and has been associated with the Solomon Asch Institute for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict.
Professor Waldron received his Bachelor’s Degree in History and Science from Harvard summa cum laude in 1971 and his Ph.D, also from Harvard, in 1981. He lived in Asia for four years, studying Chinese and Japanese. Earlier in his career he spent a year in England, a semester in France, and a semester at (then) Leningrad State University, from which he received a certificate in Russian language. He has also taught as visiting professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
He has written three books in English, edited four more books, including two in Chinese, and provided introductions to four others, including one in Chinese. His works have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Korean and Japanese. He has also authored numerous chapters in books, and scholarly articles, one of which was featured on the cover of the American Historical Review. With Professor Stuart Schram of Harvard he is co-editor of the Chinese Civil War volumes of Mao’s Road to Power and with Dr. David Parrott of Oxford, he is co-editor of Volume IV of the forthcoming Cambridge History of War. He is currently working on The Chinese volume for the Blackwell’s (Oxford) series, Peoples of the World.
Professor Waldron has served as selector for the MacArthur Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Bradley Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He serves on the boards of the Jamestown Foundation and of Freedom House, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a member of the Editorial Board of War in History and formerly of The International History Review.
Professor Waldron is a founder and vice president of the International Assessment and Stategy Center, an independent, non-partisan 501(c)3 nonprofit research organization in Washington, DC, devoted to work on foreign policy.
He has received major grants from the Henry Luce Foundation to support academic meetings in China, of which he has organized six. He has also received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Princeton University Ming History Project, Stanford University, the University of Leiden, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Australian China Council, The Center for Research on Rural and Industrial Development (India) and others. He has lectured in China, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scotland and England, among other countries, and served as external examiner at the University of Cambridge. He is a regular visitor to China and India in particular, and has traveled in all to more than fifty countries.
Professor Waldron is also a regular consultant to government, having served on the Congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and testifies regularly to both House and Senate committees. He has also served as an American representative in “track two” meetings involving Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Russia.
Eugene Wang
A native of Jiangsu, China, Eugene Yuejin Wang studied at Fudan University in Shanghai (B.A. 1983; M.A. 1986), and subsequently at Harvard University (A.M. 1990; Ph.D. 1997). He was the Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995-96) before joining the art history faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. His teaching appointment at Harvard University began in 1997, and he became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in 2005.
