Keynote Speakers
 |
James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.
Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His recent books Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009) are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book is China Airborne. (Taken from http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/) |
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a Professor of English, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Fishkin received her B.A. from Yale College and stayed on at Yale to receive her M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is one of the leading scholars in American culture and literature, particularly on the work of Mark Twain. She is the editor of the Oxford edition of Twain’s work, and she most recently edited and published The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his Life and Work (Library of America), which featured a number of previously-untranslated pieces by prominent writers from Asia, Europe and South America. She has been President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America and was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society. Fishkin is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies Fishkin’s current project is a collaborative transnational, bilingual research project dealing with the Chinese Railroad Workers whose labor helped establish the wealth that allowed Leland Stanford to build Stanford University. The goal of the Chinese Railroad Workers Project at Stanford is to try to recover their experience and their world more fully than ever before, and to understand how these workers have figured in cultural memory in the U.S. and China. ChineseRailroadWorkers.Stanford.Edu |
 |
