Kelley Currie served as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and the U.S. Representative at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Prior to her appointment, she led the Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice (2019) and served under Ambassador Nikki Haley as the United States’ Representative to the UN Economic and Social Council and Alternative Representative to the UN General Assembly (2017–2018). Throughout her career in foreign policy, Ambassador Currie has specialized in human rights, political reform, development, and humanitarian issues, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. She has held senior policy positions with the Department of State, the U.S. Congress, and several international and nongovernmental human rights and humanitarian organizations. Ambassador Currie received a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center, and an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Alexis Dudden is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean, and international history. She publishes regularly in print and online media and is completing a book project called The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850–2020. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea and has also held fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. During the 2016–17 academic year, Dudden was awarded the Fulbright program’s US-ROK Alliance Visiting Professorship at Yonsei University. Dudden received her BA from Columbia University and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago.

Jakub Grygiel is a Professor at the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). In 2017-2018 he was a Senior Advisor in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and on the faculty of SAIS-Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Return of the Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (JHU Press, 2006), and co-author with Wess Mitchell of The Unquiet Frontier (Princeton University Press, 2016). He earned a PhD, MA, and an MPA from Princeton University, and a BSFS from Georgetown University.

Bill Hayton is the Editor of the academic journal Asian Affairs, an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific program at Chatham House, a former BBC journalist and the author of four books on Asia. He was the BBC’s reporter in Vietnam in 2006–7 and was seconded to the public broadcaster in Myanmar in 2013–2014. Dr. Hayton is the author of The Invention of China (2020), The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (2014), Vietnam: Rising Dragon (2010, second edition 2020) and A Brief History of Vietnam (Tuttle, 2022) and numerous articles on Asian issues. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge for work on the history and development of South China Sea disputes. 

Jeffrey Mankoff is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the U.S. National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and a Non-Resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). His research focuses on Russian foreign policy, Eurasian geopolitics, and the role of history and memory in international relations. He is the author of the books Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security (Yale, 2022) and Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, 2012). Dr. Mankoff was previously a Senior Fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at CSIS and served as an adviser on U.S.-Russia relations at the U.S. Department of State as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. Dr. Mankoff received undergraduate degrees in international studies and Russian from the University of Oklahoma, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in diplomatic history from Yale University.

Covell Meyskens is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His research examines the geopolitical, socioeconomic, and environmental dimensions of national security and economic development in modern Chinese history. He is the author of Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He is currently working on his second book, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Developmental Engine for China and the World. His work has been published in Cold War History, Twentieth Century China, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Policy, positions: asia critique, Journal of Modern Chinese History, and the New York Times. 

James A. Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian, and world history. He also teaches in the program of the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include the Qing empire, the silk road, Eurasian lutes and music in history, and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He is series editor for the Silk Roads book series published by Chicago University Press. His publications include Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang ( 2007 and 2021), The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). 

Woodruff Smith is Professor Emeritus of History of University of Massachusetts’s, Boston.  He is the author of seven books and numerous articles on topics in the history of imperialism, German history, the history of social and cultural science, African history, economic and cultural history, and the history of higher education. He has held National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and American Philosophical Society fellowships.

Stephen Wertheim is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and an analyst of contemporary problems in American grand strategy. Wertheim is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020). He has published scholarly research on a range of subjects in U.S. foreign policy since the late nineteenth century, including humanitarian intervention, international law, international organization, colonial empire, and public opinion. Before joining Carnegie, Wertheim was Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank he co-founded in 2019. He received a PhD from Columbia University and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University.