Panelist Bios
October 10, 2026 – Celebrating the Scholarship and Legacy of Professor Elizabeth J. Perry
9:00–9:20 a.m. Opening Remarks
James Robson, Mark Wu, and Michael Puett, introduced by Yuhua Wang
James Robson is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Regional Studies East Asia M.A. program. He teaches East Asian religions, in particular Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, and Zen. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and Chan/Zen Buddhism. He has been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. Robson is also the author of “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism” (History of Religions 48:2), “Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia” (PMLA, 2010), and “A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian.” His current research includes a long term project on the history of the confluence of Buddhist monasteries and mental hospitals in Japan.
Mark Wu is the Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches international trade and international economic law. He recently returned to Harvard after serving as Senior Advisor in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Prior to academia, Wu worked as an engagement manager for McKinsey & Co., where he focused on high-tech companies. He began his career as an economist and operations officer for the World Bank in China, working on environmental, urban development, health, and rural poverty issues. Wu received his J.D. from Yale Law School, after which he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. He received his M.Sc. in Development Economics from Oxford University, which he attended on a Rhodes Scholarship, and his A.B. summa cum laude in Social Studies and East Asian Studies from Harvard University. At Harvard, he has also served as a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and as a faculty affiliate at Harvard’s Asia Center, Center for the Environment, Center for International Development, East Asian Legal Studies, and the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.
Michael Puett, the Victor and William Fung Foundation Director, Harvard University Asia Center, is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology. He holds a joint appointment in the EALC and Anthropology departments. His interests focus on the inter-relations between religion, history, anthropology, and philosophy. In his research, Puett aims to bring the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He has published many articles on early Chinese history (c. 1200 B.C. – c. 755 A.D.), as well as on classical Chinese ritual, social, and political theory. Puett is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Puett has received multiple awards for his teaching and advising, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award, the Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising, and the Harvard College Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Since 2012 his General Education course, “Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory,” has been one of the most highly enrolled undergraduate courses at Harvard.
Yuhua Wang is the Ford Foundation Professor of Modern China Studies in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His books include Tying the Autocrat’s Hands (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial China (Princeton University Press, 2022).
9:20–10:50 am Panel I: China in Historical Perspective
Chair: Yuhua Wang
Panelists: Neil Diamant, Iza Ding, Mark Frazier, Gail Hershatter, Jeff Javed, Daniel Koss, Hou Li, Victor Shih, Tia Thornton
Neil J. Diamant is Professor of Asian Law and Society and the Walter E. Beach ’56 Chair in Political Science at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA). He is the author or editor of five books dealing with various dimensions of Asian law and politics, including Revolutionizing the Family (2000), Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice (2005), Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949-2007 (2009), The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the 20th Century: A Comparative History (2020), and Useful Bullshit: Constitutions in Chinese Politics and Society (2022). Diamant teaches a wide range of courses at Dickinson, including Chinese domestic politics and foreign relations, law and society in Asia, comparative Asian political economy, Zionism, and Israeli politics. He received his PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 1996.
Iza Ding is an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022). Her writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Ideas Letter, the Berlin Journal, New Lines Magazine, Break—Down, and elsewhere. She is completing her second book. Outside her research, she writes about philosophy, culture, and politics at izading.substack.com. She received her PhD in government from Harvard University in 2016 and her BA in political science and Russian and Eastern European studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2009.
Mark Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and Co-Director of the India China Institute. His research interests include social policy, history and politics, and comparative urbanization in China and India. In 2025-26, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Visiting Researcher at National Taiwan University, for a project on the politics of population aging in Taiwan and China. He is the co-editor of Constrained Expertise in India and China: Knowledge and Power in Policymaking (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), and the author of The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay (2019); Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (2010); and The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (2002). His recent articles in China Quarterly (2023) and Studies in Comparative International Development (2026) examine protest events as “single sparks” that bring about unforeseen political outcomes. Frazier is a member of the first cohort of the Public Intellectuals Program at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Before joining The New School in 2012, he held faculty positions at the University of Oklahoma, and at Lawrence University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Gail Hershatter is Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emer. of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies. Her books include The Workers of Tianjin (1986, Chinese translation 2016), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997, Chinese translation 2003), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011; Chinese translation 2017) and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019). She is at work on a book provisionally entitled “Travels on the Revolution’s Edge.”
Jeff Javed is a Principal Researcher at LinkedIn, where he works on AI product development and evaluation strategy. He previously led AI research at Meta, Shopify, and an AI startup. Before entering industry, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. He received his PhD in Government from Harvard, where he studied the political role of historical legacies, Maoist nostalgia, and social media discourse in China. His book, Righteous Revolutionaries (2022), examines how the CCP used moral emotions to mobilize mass violence and forge political identities during the Maoist era.
Daniel Koss is an Associate Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He previously worked at Academia Sinica in Taipei and holds a PhD from Harvard’s Department of Government. His research focuses on political parties and East Asian politics, with a particular interest in history. In 2018, Cambridge University Press published his book entitled “Where the party rules: The Rank and File of China’s Communist State.” Koss is now completing a book manuscript on the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan and its predecessors.
Li Hou is a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design and an affiliate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. She was formerly Professor of Urban and Rural Planning at Tongji University. A former student of Elizabeth J. Perry, she received her Doctor of Design from Harvard in 2009, with Perry serving as her secondary advisor and a member of her dissertation committee. Building on Perry’s scholarship on Chinese working-class history and politics, Hou examines work-unit urbanism, industrial cities, and the relationships among state power, planning, and everyday life in modern China. Her book, Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State (Harvard Asia Center, 2018), received the International Planning History Society’s award for the most innovative book in planning history in 2020.
Victor C. Shih is Ho Miu Lam Chair Professor in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego specializing in China. He is the author of two monographs published by the Cambridge University Press entitled Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation and also Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi. He is also editor of Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Institutions and Financial Conditions, published by the University of Michigan Press. He is further the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and business journals, including The Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, The American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and The Wall Street Journal. Shih served as principal in The Carlyle Group’s global market strategy group and continues to advise the financial community on China related issues. He also is a life member of the Council for Foreign Relations. Shih graduated summa cum laude at the George Washington University and received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
Patricia Thornton is a Professor in the Politics of China in the Department of Politics (DPIR) and the University of Oxford China Centre, and Tutor in the Politics of China at Merton College. I am currently a Council Member of the British Association for Chinese Studies, having previously served as a member of the East and Inner Asia Council (EAIC, formerly CIAC– China-Inner Asia Council) of the Association for Asian Studies. I served on the Executive Committee of The China Quarterly‘s editorial board for ten years, and as its Acting Editor in Chief in 2021. At the University of Oxford’s DPIR, I have previously served as Chair of the Sub-Faculty of Politics and International Relations, and Chair of the PPE Committee, which oversees and manages the PPE degree programme at the University of Oxford.
11:10 am – 12:40 pm Panel II: China in Comparative Perspective
Chair: Martin Dimitrov
Panelists: Regina Abrami, Sheena Greitens, Jingkai He, Karrie Koesel, Ching Kwan Lee, Kristen Looney, Meg Rithmire, Lily Tsai
Martin K. Dimitrov is the Livingston Family Chair in Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He serves as Associate Editor for Asia of Problems of Post-Communism and Associate Editor for Inner Asia of The Journal of Asian Studies. His books include Dictatorship and Information (2023) and The Adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party (2024). He is a member of the National Committee on United States–China Relations.
Regina Abrami is Chang Sun Term Professor and Faculty Director of the Global Program and Strategic Initiatives at the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests focus on comparative and international political economy with recent emphasis on the globalization of Chinese business, economic statecraft and government-business relations. Earlier work considered the origins of market formation and private sector development in Vietnam and China. She is the co-author of Can China Lead? Reaching the Limits of Power and Growth (Harvard Business Review Press). Other published work appeared in Comparative Politics, Journal of East Asian Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Asian Business Systems. In addition to private advisory work, Abrami previously served as the Faculty Director of Perry World House’s Graduate Associates Program (2022-2025) and head of the Lauder Institute’s International Studies faculty (2015-2021). At Wharton, she has been the recipient of teaching awards since 2019 for her course, “Competing with China: Geopolitics, Governance, and Global Strategy.”
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program and serves as editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. Her research focuses on national and international security, authoritarian politics and foreign policy, and East Asia. She is concurrently serving as Visiting Associate Professor of Research in Indo-Pacific Security at the U.S. Army War College (China Landpower Studies Center) and as a Nonresident Scholar with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author of two books, Dictators and their Secret Police (2016) and Politics of the North Korean Diaspora(2023), and is currently finishing a third book manuscript, which analyzes how preoccupation with regime security shapes Chinese grand strategy.
Jingkai He is an independent scholar whose research focuses on authoritarian regimes, state coercion, social movements, and political parties.
Karrie J. Koesel is associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where she specializes in the study of Chinese and Russian politics, authoritarianism, and the intersection of religion and politics. She is the author of Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict and the Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Citizens & the State in Authoritarian Regimes: Comparing China & Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Democratization, The China Quarterly, Post-Soviet Affairs, Politics and Religion, Economics and Politics, and the Review of Religion and Chinese Society, among others. Her research has been supported by the Minerva Research Initiative, John Templeton Foundation, Spencer Foundation, Carnegie China Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Fulbright program, International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Before joining the ND faculty, she taught at the University of Oregon and holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is currently working on a book, Learning to Be Loyal: Political Education in Authoritarian Regimes, which compares how authoritarian leaders cultivate popular legitimacy and support among youth in the Soviet Union, China, and Russia.
Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA. Her research interests include political sociology, labor, development, global south and global China. Her recent publications include The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago, 2017) and Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle (Harvard 2025). She is the series editor of Cambridge Elements in Global China.
Kristen E. Looney is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University. Her research is on rural development and grassroots governance in China and East Asia. She holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Wellesley College and a PhD in Government from Harvard University.
Meg Rithmire is the James E. Robison Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. She holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and is the author of two books on Chinese politics (Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, 2015 and Precarious Ties, Oxford University Press, 2023), and many scholarly articles. She is on the editorial boards of the China Quarterly and the China Journal.
Lily L. Tsai is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Director of the Concourse Program, as well as the former Chair of the MIT Faculty. Her research focuses on governance, legitimacy, and the role of moral evaluations in political behavior, with particular interests in the creation of trust, cooperation, and community. In 2016, she founded MIT GOV/LAB to work with policymakers and practitioners on innovations in democratic governance and civic engagement. Tsai is the author of two books, Accountability without Democracy and When People Want Punishment: Retributive Justice and the Puzzle of Authoritarian Popularity, and over two dozen journal articles. She is the current Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Fellow and co-leads the Compass Initiative, which brings together faculty and students from humanities and STEM to design classes and activities that promote debate and reflection about moral, social, and civic questions.
2:00 – 3:30 pm Panel III: Reflections on Professor Perry’s Scholarly Contributions
Chair: Ben Read
Panelists: Tim Cheek, Debbie Davis, Joe Esherick, Mary Gallagher, Devesh Kapur, Prerna Singh, Peidong Sun, Jeff Wasserstrom, Helin Wu
Ben Read is a professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei (Stanford, 2012), and coauthor of Field Research in Political Science: Practices and Principles (Cambridge, 2015). His next book asks when Taiwan’s city and county councils can meaningfully oversee their powerful mayors. He edits the Cambridge Elements series in Politics and Society in East Asia.
Timothy Cheek is Professor and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at The University of British Columbia. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals and the history of the Chinese Communist Party.
Deborah Davis joined the Yale faculty in 1978 and retired in 2018. At Yale she chaired the Dept of Sociology, the Council of East Asian Studies, and the Women’s faculty forum. Past publications analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification, occupational mobility, and urbanization. Prior to teaching at Yale, Davis taught at Chung Chi College in Hong Kong and at Tunghai University in Taiwan. She previously served six terms as a Trustee of the Yale China Association and chaired the Advisory Board of the Universities’ Service Center Library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Humanities and Social Science panel for the Hong Kong University Grants Council.
Joseph W. Esherick is Emeritus Professor, University of California, San Diego. He was Distinguished Professor of History, University of California, San Diego, 2010-12; Professor of History and Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Professor of Chinese Studies, University of California-San Diego, 1990-2012; and Assistant, Associate and Full Professor of History, University of Oregon, l971-l990. He was Director, Chinese Studies Program, UCSD, 1991-1994, 2001-2004; and Director, EAP Beijing Study Center, 1994-95, 2010-2011. His monographs include Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China (University of California Press), Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey Through Chinese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press: 1987), which was winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies; and Reform and Revolution in China: the 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (University of California Press: 1976; paperback: 1986; second edition with new preface: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1999).
Mary E. Gallagher is the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the John L Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. She received her Ph.D. in politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991. Her research focuses on Chinese politics, US-China Relations, and Chinese state-society relations, especially labor politics and labor law. She was previously the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights Professor at the University of Michigan and the director of the International Institute. She was the director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies from 2008-2020.
Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His most recent book is A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey (Oxford University Press, 2026).
Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies, with appointments in the School of Public Health and the Department of Sociology at Brown University. She has published numerous award-winning books and articles on human development, public health, ethnicity and nationalism. Her first book, How Solidarity Works for Welfare was awarded best book prizes from both the American Political Science and the American Sociological Associations. Singh has been awarded fellowships by the Rockefeller foundation, the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Carnegie foundation, the American Academy of Berlin, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She has shared her research with scholarly, policy and popular audiences in over a hundred lectures, including keynote addresses, delivered across twenty different countries. Singh has served on the academic advisory board of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the steering committee of the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown, is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and co-convenes the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar in South Asian Politics. She also serves on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Comparative Politics and Elements in the Politics of Development series and was previously on the editorial board of the journal, Studies in Comparative International Development. From 2021-23, Singh serves as President of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association. She is presently working on a book entitled ‘Moral Vaccination: How Ideas and Institutions Controlled Contagion in China and India’. The book draws on a comparative historical analysis of subnational (cities, provinces) and national units of China and India to develop a novel ‘moral’ theory of popular compliance with public health interventions, specifically vaccination. In addition, she is working on a range of collaborative projects around the themes of nationalism, on the one hand, and development, welfare and well-being, specially public health, on the other. This includes co-authoring a book ‘National Solidarities and Strong States: When and Why Ethnic Diversity is not a Curse for Development and Democracy’ with Matthias vom Hau for Cambridge University Press’s Elements in the Politics of Development series. Singh has contributed popular writing to the LA Times, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, the Hindu, the Times of India and the Seminar among other outlets. She has studied at Princeton, Cambridge and Delhi Universities. Prior to joining Brown, she was on the faculty of the Department of Government at Harvard University.
Peidong Sun is the Distinguished Associate Professor of Arts & Sciences in China and Asia-Pacific Studies and an associate professor of History at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the everyday history and politics of the PRC and the CCP. Her three previous books examine fashion and politics in Guangdong and beyond during the Cultural Revolution, collective anxiety and parental matchmaking in Shanghai, and transnational “scholar–state nexus.” Over the past twelve years, she has devoted her research to a trilogy: Red DNA: How the Cultural Revolution has shaped the Xi Jinping generation; Underground: Reading and the making of the Xi Jinping generation; and The CCP Mind: Sex, Power, and Domination.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine and the author of books such as Student Protests in Twentieth Century China (1991) and Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020). In 1984, he received a master’s in Regional Studies: East Asian Studies from Harvard, where one person he studied with was Elizabeth Perry, then in Cambridge as a visiting professor there. He went on to get a Phd. in History at Berkeley. From 2008 to 2018 he edited the Journal of Asian Studies, and he often writes for newspapers and magazines.
Helin Wu is an Associate Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Institute of Modern Chinese History, as well as Deputy Director of the Indian Studies Center at Central China Normal University (CCNU). His research interests include nineteenth-century China–India cultural exchanges and the history of Christian colleges in China. He was a Visiting Fellow in the Indian Studies in China Program at the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 2023 to 2024, where he conducted research on the historical connections between British missionaries in China and India. Before joining the Institute of Modern Chinese History, Dr. Wu served in various administrative and international engagement roles at CCNU, including Vice Dean of the CCNU–University of Wollongong Joint Institute and Deputy Director of national engineering research centers. He has extensive experience in international academic exchange, higher education cooperation, and the study of modern Chinese and global history.
3:50 – 5:20 pm Panel IV: Institution Building at Harvard and Beyond
Chair: Susan Pharr
Panelists: Andy Gordon, Helena Kolenda, Terry Lautz, Ruohong Li, Orville Schell, Bob Snow, Stefanie Van Pelt
Susan J. Pharr is Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics Emerita in the Department of Government at Harvard University. At Harvard she is a former Director and current Senior Adviser of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Dr. Pharr joined the Harvard faculty in 1987. She was Chair of the Government Department 1992-1995, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences 1996-1998. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1975. From 1974-76, she served as a Staff Associate at the Social Sciences Research Council in New York. Thereafter, until 1986, she was on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1985-87, on a leave from Wisconsin, she held the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she has been a visiting scholar or fellow in the Faculty of Law of University of Tokyo and of Keio University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars; the Brookings Institution; and St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. She has also served as Senior Social Scientist with the Agency for International Development. Much of her research has explored the social basis for democracy in Japan and East Asia, and the origins and development of civil society and its role in social and political change worldwide, particularly in Asia. Her research interests include comparative political behavior; Japanese politics; Japanese foreign policy and the international relations of East Asia; domestic and international NGOs in politics; comparative politics of industrialized nations; democratization and social change in Japan and Asia; political ethics and corruption; environmental politics; the role of the media in politics; women and politics; the role of Japan and the United States in development, and the international political economy of development.
Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Research Professor of History, Emeritus, at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. He has written, edited, and translated numerous books and has published articles in journals in the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. His most recent monograph, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011), examines the making of the modern consumer in 20th-century Japan, using the sewing machine as window into that story. This book was translated into Japanese and published by Misuzu Shobo in 2013. He is currently completing a book titled From History to Heritage: Japan’s Struggle with its Industrial Past.
Helena Kolenda – Prior to her retirement in January 2024, Ms. Kolenda worked at the Henry Luce Foundation for 25 years, as program officer (1998-2008) and program director (2008-2023) of its Asia Program. She holds a BA in Chinese Language and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley (1980) and a JD from the University of Texas School of Law (1989). Between 1981 and 1996, she spent a decade in China, working first as an English teacher with Volunteers in Asia and later as an attorney with the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Ms. Kolenda serves on the boards of the EEPS Foundation, the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation and the Yale-China Association. She is a Senior Advisor to the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations and a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.
Terry Lautz is former vice president and secretary of the Henry Luce Foundation, and has served as a trustee and board chair of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Lingnan Foundation, and Yale-China Association. He is currently a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and is working on an anthology of firsthand American accounts of China’s Communist revolution, 1948–1952. Terry holds a BA from Harvard College (magna cum laude) and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford University. His book Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford, 2022) includes a chapter on Elizabeth Perry.
Ruohong Li is Associate Director at the Harvard-Yenching Institute and has been working at the Institute since 2001. She is responsible for the planning and operations of the HYI’s fellowship programs, advanced field development program and publication projects in Asia. She is also responsible for building and strengthening institutional ties with the Institute’s 60 partner universities and research institutions in Asia. Ruohong got her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the history of China and Inner Asian relations. With interdisciplinary academic training, Dr. Li also does research on the history of Qing and Tibet relations, and, more recently, on westerners’ travelogues about China’s borderlands as well as the historiography of Sinology in relation to the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations and VP at the Asia Society in New York City and former Dean at the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He graduated from Harvard University in Far Eastern History; studied Chinese at Stanford University, was a student at National Taiwan University; and did his PhD work at Berkeley in Chinese History. After working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, he covered the war in Indochina and has been in and out of China since the mid-70s. He’s author of more than 20 books including one novel, ‘My Old Home: A Novel of Exile,” and many works of non-fiction, including the Wealth and Power: China’s long March to the 21st Century in 2021 and “Inside China Secret Prisons: An Undercover Expose and its Lasting Legacy” published in 2026. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Smith Richardson Foundation grant and is the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, a Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism and is presently a fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Bob Snow: I got interested in the study of Asia as a college student during the Vietnam War years. In 1968 Liz Perry and I were part of a small group of American students in a summer program that brought us to an international conference in Japan for people from various countries involved in peace movements. And we then went on to an international student work camp in South Korea, building a road up a mountain. (Many good stories….) I finished college in 1969 and, as a Conscientious Objector, I spent two years in Hong Kong, which changed my life. Before I went to Hong Kong I had been accepted into a PhD program in sociology at Harvard. When I returned to the U.S. I was fortunate enough to become a student of Ezra Vogel’s. I received my PhD from Harvard in sociology in 1977. My life after grad school increasingly moved me away from academia and toward work in a variety of roles with an eclectic mix of NGOs involved in human rights and international development including, among others, Oxfam America, the American Jewish World Service, the Maryknoll Fathers, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Part of that work involved learning about fundraising, everyone’s least favorite job. When I learned that the Association for Asian Studies was looking for a person with experience in grant writing and fundraising, I applied. I became the Director of Outreach and Strategic Initiatives for AAS from 2007 to 2017 when I retired. Since then, I have worked on a volunteer basis, and mostly via Zoom, with several NGOs in various parts of Asia.
Stefanie Van Pelt was the assistant director of the Fairbank Center during 1997-2003.