Pallavi Aiyar is an award-winning foreign correspondent and author. She writes a weekly newsletter on global travel and culture, “The Global Jigsaw.” Pallavi has reported from across China, Europe, Indonesia and Japan and contributed to publications including The Hindu, The New York Times, Granta, Nikkei Asian Review, The Wire, and El Pais. She is currently Associate Editor of the online magazine The Globalist. She is the author of the China memoir, Smoke and Mirrors. Her most recent book is, Orienting: An Indian in Japan.
Steve Allison is a professor at UCI with a joint appointment in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and studies the resilience of microbial communities to drought and the effect of rapid climate change on carbon losses from southern California ecosystems. He recently became the director of UCI’s Newkirk Center for Science and Society.
Emily Baum is an associate professor of modern Chinese history at UC Irvine. Her first book, The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2018. She is currently writing a history of acupuncture in China and the United States in the 1970s.
Wilfred Chan is an editor at non-profit tech magazine New_ Public and a contributing writer at The Nation. He was previously a journalist at CNN in Hong Kong, where he helped cover the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Currently based in New York, he writes about Asia, labor, tech, and housing.
Yangyang Cheng is a fellow and research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her research focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.‒China relations. Her essays on these and related topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a columnist at SupChina and a contributing columnist at Physics World. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her PhD in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Olivier Civelli is Eric L. and Lila D. Nelson Chair in Neuropharmacology College of Health Sciences at UCI. He has a joint appointment in Developmental & Cell Biology as well as Pharmaceutical Sciences. His research aims at furthering our understanding of the diversity of brain function by identifying and studying novel molecules which mediate synaptic transmission. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a 2015-17 Chinese Academy of Sciences President’s International Fellowship Initiative for Visiting Scientists.
Eileen C. Chow is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is also Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature. Eileen also serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books and serves as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory.
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is also Associate Director of the Programme for Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. Peter often writes for the international press, including The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Guardian, and has a regular column in the London Evening Standard. His book Silk Roads was named The Daily Telegraph’s History Book of the Year 2015, was a New York Times Bestseller, as well as a Sunday Times Book of the Decade 2010-20, and voted one of the 25 most important books translated into Chinese in the last 40 years. His most recent book is The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018), which won the Carical Prize for Social Sciences in Italy in 2019.
Jorge Guajardo served for six years in Beijing as the Mexican Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. Prior to this, he was Consul General of Mexico to the US in Austin, Texas, and a Mexican congressional candidate in 2003. He previously served as Director of Communications for the Governor of Nuevo León, Mexico from 1997 to 2000. Ambassador Guajardo also has substantial experience in the private sector. He is currently Senior Director of McLarty Associates.
Isabel Hilton is a London-based international journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in a wide range of national and international publications, including the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the New Yorker the Financial Times and many others. She presented the World tonight on BBC Radio 4 and Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3, and has reported over many years from Latin America, South Asia, China and Europe. She is founder and senior advisor of chinadialogue.net, a non-profit publication that focuses on the environment and climate change. Hilton holds two honorary doctorates and was awarded the OBE for her work in raising environmental awareness in China.
Dalia Dassa Kaye is a senior fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations. In 2020-2021 she was a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center and from 2012-2020 was a senior political scientist and director of RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy. Before joining RAND, Kaye lived in The Netherlands and from 1998-2003 was an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, publishes widely on Middle East policy issues, and has appeared in numerous media outlets. She is the author of two books, Talking to the Enemy: Track Two Diplomacy in the Middle East and South Asia and Beyond the Handshake: Multilateral Cooperation in the Arab-Israeli Peace Process. Dalia holds her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at UCI and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. His 2019 book Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports) explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, he has also published essays in such publications as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, JustSecurity and The Los Angeles Times.
Anka Lee is the Senior Advisor on the People’s Republic of China in the Bureau of Policy, Planning, and Learning at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In this role, he coordinates strategy and all efforts relating to the PRC across USAID. Before joining the Biden-Harris Administration, he was a Global Policy Manager at WhatsApp, the world’s largest private messaging app. He has followed China issues as an intelligence analyst, Congressional staffer, print and broadcast journalist, and as an advisor to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Samuel Berger.
Gregory Lee is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of St. Andrews, where he also directs the university’s China Studies program. He specializes in the culture and cultural history of China and its diaspora from the nineteenth-century imagining of China the nation-state to today. His areas of interest include collective memory, censorship, the technical/technological society, the Anthropocene, and the ideology and representation of work. He is particularly interested in the contribution premodern, pre-Chinese thought may make to the resolution of contemporary problems.
Rebecca Liao is cofounder and CEO at Sagan, a protocol that aims to empower visionary Web3 founders and developers, and a cofounder, advisor, and former COO at Skuchain, a currency-agnostic blockchain for global trade and a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer for 2019. She is currently an advisor to Sommelier Protocol, where she is designing their DAO to optimize for governance, platform growth & regulatory compliance. She is also a fellow at the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, where her work focuses on tech policy.
Perry Link is Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at UC Riverside and Professor emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He teaches mainly modern Chinese language and literature and has published in those fields as well as on Chinese popular culture, intellectual history, art and politics. His recent books are An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics and Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. A new book in press is Long March to Freedom: the Life and Times of Liu Xiaobo.
Christine Loh is chief development strategist and adjunct professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Institute of the Environment and Division of Environment and Sustainability. She was the former undersecretary for the environment (2012-17), and a former lawmaker. She is also the former CEO of Civic Exchange, a nonprofit public policy think tank and founder of the Citizens Party and founder of Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor. Loh is a lawyer by training and has helped to establish several nonprofit organizations in Hong Kong related to the environment, equal opportunity, arts and culture, and human rights.
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford. His books include Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 which was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist, and China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent radio documentaries “Meanwhile in Beijing” on contemporary Chinese politics and “The Great Wall” on US-China relations since the Nixon visit are available on BBC Sounds. He is a regular presenter of the BBC Arts and Ideas Podcast.
Dr. Gustavo Oliveira is assistant professor of global and international studies at UC Irvine. He obtained a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, and was visiting scholar at the Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in China, postdoctoral fellow at Swarthmore College, and visiting assistant professor at Peking University. He examines Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness and infrastructure, China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America, and the political ecology of natural resource governance. He is Co-PI of a USDA-funded project on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply chains, and co-editor of Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America (Routledge, 2018), Beyond the Global Land Grab: New Directions for Research on Land Struggles and Global Agrarian Change (Routledge, 2021), and a special of Political Geography on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2020). He is revising a manuscript entitled Brazil, China, and the Global Land Grab.
John Pomfret is an award-winning writer and former foreign correspondent and editor at the Washington Post. His books include The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, America and China, 1776 to the Present and Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China. He was awarded the Osborn Elliott Prize for Journalism in Asia by the Asia Society in 2003 and the Shorenstein Award by Harvard and Stanford universities for his lifetime coverage of Asia.
Maria Repnikova is a scholar of China’s political communication and an Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Georgia State University. This year she is a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. In the past, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She received her doctorate (DPhil) in Politics at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at UCI, Director of the UCI Center on Globalization, Law, and Society, and President-Elect of the American Society of International Law. His publications include nine books and over one hundred articles and book chapters. His newest book is Emerging Powers and the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law (2021).
Junko Terao is an Italian-Japanese journalist. After graduating in languages and oriental literature from the Ca’Foscari University in Venice, she worked in the foreign desks of Lettera22, Manifesto, and Riformista. Since 2010, she has been the Asia and Pacific editor of the weekly magazine Internazionale.
Isabella Velicogna is Professor of Earth System Sciences at UCI and a part-time faculty member at NASA/Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She uses novel geophysical methods and satellite remote sensing techniques to understand the physical processes governing ice sheet mass balance and the hydrologic cycle of high latitude regions, with an emphasis on time-variable gravity from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, follow-on gravity missions, and other geophysical data (GPS, precipitation reanalysis, laser altimetry, regional climate models, and in situ observations).
Afra Wang is a California-based podcaster and tech enthusiast. She works full-time in an AI-driven news company, where she chases the intense U.S. news cycle and spends most of her time in product management. When she is not on Slack and Notion, she channels her free time and creative energy into Loud Murmurs, the Chinese-language podcast she co-founded in 2018, focusing on culture, movies, and society. She studied at UCI from 2012-2016, majoring in History and Film&Media Studies.
Alex Wang is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He is a leading expert on environmental governance and the law and politics of China. His research focuses on the social effects of law, and the interaction of law and institutions in China and the United States. His work has addressed air pollution, climate change, and other environmental issues.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UCI, where he is also a Professor of Law, by courtesy, and Historical Writing Mentor for the Literary Journalism Program. He has written for many magazines (such as Index on Censorship, Slate, and New Left Review) and a wide variety of newspapers, blogs, and journals of opinion. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, and is the advising editor for China for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His newest book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, was published by Columbia Global Reports in February of 2020.
Amy Wilentz is a professor of literary journalism at UC Irvine and the author of books including The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger, and Martyr’s Crossing. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. She won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir for her book Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction in 2020. Wilentz is the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American Studies at UCI, where she is also Director of the Humanities Center and a Chancellor’s Fellow. Her books include Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: A Life of a Wartime Celebrity and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Her forthcoming book, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress is a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the namesake of Title IX.
Guobin Yang is Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society, Interim Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of the award-winning The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009) and The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016). His new book The Wuhan Lockdown is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
Hu Ying is Professor and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at UCI. The focus of her research is the literature and culture of late 19th to early 20th century China. She is the author of Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918 (Stanford, 2000), Burying Autumn: Death, Poetry and Friendship (Harvard, 2016) and coeditor of Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (UC, 2012).
Cindy Yu is The Spectator’s broadcast editor based in London, and host of the bimonthly podcast Chinese Whispers. She was born in China and grew up in the UK, where she studied philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford. She also has a masters in contemporary Chinese studies.
Dr. Li Zhang is a researcher in the Department of Global and International Studies of the University of California Irvine, and this summer she joins Amherst College as assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Department of Environmental Studies. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from the China Agricultural University, and was previously visiting fellow at Cornell University’s Department of Global Development, and assistant professor of development sociology at Henan Agricultural University. She uses ethnographic methods, surveys, and digital archives to examine food safety, security, and sovereignty, gender, race/ethnicity, and indigeneity, health and environmental justice, and climate change resilience and adaptation, focusing on China and its global connections. She is Co-PI of a USDA-funded national-level study on the impacts of the current pandemic on food supply chains, and author of The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2021).