A native of Toronto, Timothy Brook earned degrees from University of Toronto and Harvard and taught at both. He has held appointments at University of Alberta, Stanford, University of British Columbia, and Oxford University. At UBC he also holds the Republic of China Chair in UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. He is an honorary professor of East China Normal University, Shanghai, and holds an honorary doctorate from University of Warwick. He has published five books on the Ming dynasty, two on China in the 20th century, and one on global history. He has also edited nine volumes. For The Confusions of Pleasure (1998), he received the Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies and the Garneau Medal from the Canadian Historical Association. Vermeer’s Hat (2008) was awarded the Lynton Prize in History by Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation of Harvard. Death by a Thousand Cuts (2008) was given the Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association. Brook edits the six-volume History of Imperial China (Harvard); his volume is The Troubled Empire (2010). Translations of his books have appeared in a dozen languages.

Michael Knight serves as the Senior Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of SF. Prior to coming to the Asian Art Museum in 1996, Dr. Knight spent 15 years at the Seattle Art Museum with his final posting as the Foster Foundation Associate Curator of Asian Art. He also taught for four years at the University of Washington where he was Affiliate Assistant Professor of Chinese Art. Michael received his PhD in Chinese Art History, Master of Philosophy and Master of Arts from Columbia University and his Bachelor of Arts from Willamette University. He is curator or co-curator of many exhibitions, including Shanghai: Art of the City (2010), Power and Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty (2008), Later Chinese Jades: Ming Dynasty to Early Twentieth Century (2008), The Elegant Gathering: the Yeh Family Collection (2006), and The Monumental Landscapes of Li Huayi (2004).

Sheila Melvin is a writer and consultant who specializes in China. A regular contributor to the International Herald Tribune, primarily on the arts in China, she has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Wilson Quarterly, and other publications. She is co-author, with her husband Jindong Cai, of Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese, which was short-listed for the Saroyan Prize in 2005, and the author of The Little Red Book of China Business. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she taught English in Taipei while studying Chinese and was a student at Shanghai's Fudan University in the tumultuous spring of 1989. She has an honors MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and received the school's A. Doak Barnett Award for Excellence in China Studies.

Lynn Struve is Professor Emerita of History, Indiana University (PhD, University of Michigan). Her interests are the political, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth century China, and in comparing Chinese phenomena of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries with contemporaneous phenomena elsewhere. Research has focused on the fall of the Ming dynasty and the early rule of China by the Manchu-Qing dynasty, particularly on personal records left by people then, which vividly reveal the subjective consciousness of members of the literate social stratum as their world fell into turmoil. Other, related specializations are Ming and Qing historiography, late-imperial trends in Neo-Confucianism and classical scholarship, and psychological aspects of autobiographical expression in the Ming-Qing era. She has held grants from American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright Foundation, and the Committee for Scholarly Research in the PRC. Publications include The Southern Ming, 1644-1662 (1984); Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws (1993); The Ming-Qing Conflict, 1619-1683: A Historiography and Source Guide (1998); (ed.) The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (2004); (ed.) Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition: East Asia from Ming to Qing (2005).

Sophie Volpp is Associate Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultures (Chinese), UC Berkeley, in the Chinese Program and Comparative Literature (Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard, 1995). She specializes in Chinese literature of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Research interests include the history of performance, gender theory, the history of sexuality, and the representation of material culture. Her forthcoming book Worldly Stage (Harvard) concerns the ideological niche occupied by the theater in seventeenth-century China. Her current research examines the depiction of material objects in late-imperial literature, focusing on the relation between the representation of objects and the representation of the self. 

Wen-Hsin Yeh is Walter and Elise Haas Chair Professor in Asian Studies and Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair in History, UC Berkeley. She is also an Honorary Professor of History at Peking University. As Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, Yeh fosters inter-disciplinary and cross-regional research situated in both historical and contemporary East Asia. A leading authority on twentieth-century Chinese history, Yeh is author or editor of eleven books and numerous articles examining aspects of Republican history, Chinese modernity, the origins of communism and related subjects. Her most recent publication, Shanghai Splendor (2007) is an urban history of Shanghai that considers the nature of Chinese capitalism and middle-class society in a century of contestation between colonial power and nationalistic mobilization.


Gangqin Zhao, a member of Chinese Musicians' Association, finished her study in the Music Department of Nanjing Normal University in 1987. She was named one of 10 Best Musicians by the university in 1990. She was an instructor of guzheng in the Nanjing Children Music and Dance School for years before she immigrated to the US in the late 1990s. She has performed internationally and is the director of Chinese Arts & Music Center in San Francisco. Her students competed in the 2010 International World Cup Chinese Instruments Competition where they won Gold Medals.

Yangqin Zhao is Artistic Director, Melody of China. A member of Chinese Musicians' Association and the Chinese Nationalities Orchestra Society, Zhao graduated with Honors in Music at Nanjing Normal University and headed the faculty of Instrumental Music there. She won the highest award by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of the People's Republic of China in 1982 and first prize at the Jiangsu Provincial Arts Festival in 1987 and 1991. She appeared in Who's Who in Young Chinese and The Chinese Musicians Yearbook in 1990. She has performed in Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Germany. In 1996, she was invited as one of seven greatest musicians on the yangqin for the Tanz & Folk Fest Rudolstadt in Germany. Zhao represented China and the US playing the Chinese hammered dulcimer at the International Santur Festival in Iran in 2003. She has performed with the Shanghai Chinese and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, The Woman Philharmonic, and the SF Symphony.

Presented with support from Grants for the Arts/SF Hotel Tax fund; George and Judy Marcus Family Foundation; Bank of the West; Stanford Humanities Center; UC Berkeley Institute for East Asian Studies, USF Center for the Pacific Rim; Marines Memorial Theatre; Asian Art Museum, and individual donors.