Michael Szonyi

Michael Szonyi is professor of Chinese history and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. Born in Canada, he received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is a specialist in the history of China's Ming Dynasty (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) but he also writes about contemporary China.  His recent books include The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power (edited with Jennifer Rudolph) and The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China.

Michael has been travelling in Asia for more than thirty years, and he teaches about the region in his course Asian Diasporas, about the histories of Chinese and Indian emigration.  Michael is married to Francine McKenzie; they spent their honeymoon in rural Mongolia. They have two children who also like to travel.