Meyer Michael
The Contemporary History Institute sponsors Michael Meyer talking about “Covering China from the Ground Up” on Feb. 23 at 4:30 p.m. in Baker 242.
Since first arriving in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer 20 years ago, Michael Meyer has witnessed and written about the transformation of China, at the level of both an urban neighborhood and a remote village. His award-winning first book “The Last Days of Old Beijing” documented changes in the daily life in the capital’s oldest neighborhood as the city remade itself for the 2008 Olympics. In his second book “In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China,” he describes the experience of his wife’s relatives as their family rice farm developed into a corporate agribusiness.
Amplifying the story of family and Wasteland, Meyer—via photographs—will take us on a journey across Manchuria’s past, a history that explains much about contemporary China—from the fall of the last emperor to Japanese occupation and Communist victory. Meyer will also talk about the challenges of reporting from China and how a freelance writer can fund and produce books that reach a wide audience.
Professor Michael Meyer is a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program, a recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar fellowship, and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches nonfiction writing. The final book in his China trilogy, The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.
This event is free and open to the public.
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