About Me

I have been studying China since the summer of 1966 when I took a course on modern Chinese history at the University of California at Berkeley. I decided to take the course in order to better understand the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was just in its beginning stages. The instructor was the legendary Harvard professor, Benjamin I. Schwartz. Although we never made it to the Cultural Revolution in that course, Prof. Schwartz's telling of the collapse of the Chinese empire, the rise of Mao Zedong, and the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war that led to the founding of the People's Republic of China had captivated me.

When I returned to Cornell for my sophomore year, I took the plunge into learning Chinese and began my study of Chinese politics under the mentorship of the late Prof, John W. Lewis. Prof. Lewis became my undergraduate advisor, and I was very fortunate to be able to continue learning from him at Stanford, where I completed an M.A. in East Asian Studies (1971) and a Ph.D. in political science (1981).

I made my first trip to Asia to study in Taiwan in 1969, and to China in 1972 as a member of a delegation from the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. You can see find out more about CCAS and see photos from that extraordinary journey by clicking the link in the previous sentence.

I've been teaching at Wellesley since 1980.

EDUCATION

B.A., Cornell University (Government and Asian Studies), 1969

M.A., Stanford University, East Asian Studies, 1971

Ph.D., Stanford University, Political Science, 1981