John Zinda studies social and environmental change, primarily in rural China. His research and teaching examine how state policies and community practices intersect to shape livelihoods and landscapes in contexts of agricultural development programs, afforestation efforts, biodiversity conservation, tourism operations, and labor migration.

Liren Zheng is the curator of the Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia at the Cornell University Library. Previously he was the curator of the Dr. Shao You-Bao Overseas Chinese Research and Documentation Center, Ohio University Library.

XU Xin is the program manager for the China and Asia-Pacific Studies program (CAPS). His research and teaching focus on Chinese foreign policy and East Asian international relations. His areas of interest include the identity politics of the Taiwan issue, China’s grand strategy, East Asian security politics, and Olympics and international relations.

John Whitman is a professor of linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences. His main interest is the problem of language variation: its limits (how much specific subsystems can vary across languages) and predictors (what typological features co-occur systematically). Exploration of this general problem has led him to work on historical linguistics and language acquisition, in addition to his central interest in synchronic syntactic variation across typologically similar languages.