2023 Speakers

Day One: April 6th

Kevin Mo

Principal, Green Development Program

Dr. Kevin Mo has rich experience in strategic planning and policy research related to energy and climate change in China and the United States. At present, his research focuses on international carbon neutrality policy, ecological carbon sinks, green finance and other fields.

Previously, he was the executive director of the China Center of Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC). In 2017, in recognition of his continuous promotion of China’s international cooperation in the fields of green development and climate change, he was selected as one of the “Top Ten Green Driving Forces” by China Real Estate News and other institutions. In 2005, he won the first Legacy Award issued by the American Environment and Energy Building Association. In 1995, he won the second prize of Scientific and Technological Progress Award from the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

Vikram Nehru

Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at JHU SAIS

Vikram Nehru focuses on development economics, growth, poverty reduction, debt sustainability, governance, and the performance and prospects of East Asia. His SAIS courses and research interests have centered on the economic, political, and strategic issues confronting Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.

From 2016 to 2023, Nehru was a Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at SAIS, teaching courses on development economics, Asian economic development, Southeast Asian economic development, and the political economy of Indonesia.  From 2011 to 2016, he was the Chair of Southeast Asian Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and for three decades prior to that, Nehru served in the World Bank, including in a number of senior management positions.

Wendy Leutert

Assistant Professor and GLP-Ming Z. Mei Chair of Chinese Economics and Trade at Indiana University

Wendy Leutert is an assistant professor at Indiana University whose research focuses on the reform and global expansion of China’s state-owned enterprises. Her research also addresses corporate governance, international investment, international development, and Sino-Japanese exchanges. Her work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education through the Fulbright-Hays and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Programs, the Ford Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and the Chinese Scholarship Council, among others.

 Wendy’s research has appeared in numerous journals, such as Studies in Comparative International Development, International Security, New Political Economy, The China Quarterly, Business and Politics, World Development, Pacific Affairs, China Perspectives, and Asia Policy.

Dr. Gillian Zhang

Curatorial Research Associate of Chinese Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston

Gillian Zhang is a Curatorial Research Associate of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her Ph.D. in art history from The Ohio State University, with a specialization in antiquarianism and collecting history in late imperial China, print culture, and cultural interactions in Eurasia art. Gillian has previously had positions at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Yuhua Ding

Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections, Wellesley College Davis Museum

Yuhua Ding is the Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections and Academic Affairs at Wellesley. Yuhua oversees the collection of Asian Art at the Davis Museum. She also serves as a liaison between the Museum and the academic community at Wellesley College. Before joining the Davis Museum, Yuhua was the Gregory and Maria Henderson Curatorial Fellow in East Asian Art at Harvard Art Museums. She conducted scholarship on the Philip Hofer Collection of Chinese art at the Harvard Art Museums, curated and co-curated permanent collection rotation of Art by the Book (2023), Picturing Lives of Women (2021) and contributed to the special exhibitions Earthly Delights: 6,000 Years of Asian Ceramics (2022). She received her Ph.D. at Cornell University. Major exhibitions she organized at the Johnson Museum of Cornell University include Debating Art: Chinese Intellectuals at the Crossroads (2018) and Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation in East Asian Art (2016).

Michael Berry

Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, 

Michael Berry’s areas of research include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, popular culture in modern China, and literary translation. Berry’s approach is transnational, and his work addresses the richness and diversity of Chinese art and culture as it has manifested itself in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Sinophone communities. He is the author of full-length interview books with award-winning film director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (in Chinese), and An Accented Cinema: Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, a volume of conversations with Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke.

He is also an active literary translator, and he has translated several important contemporary Chinese novels by Yu Hua (To Live), Ye Zhaoyan (Nanjing 1937), and Chang Ta-chun (Wild Kids). His co-translation with Susan Chan Egan of Wang Anyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2009 MLA Lois Roth Award for an outstanding translation of a literary work. 

Yao Wu

Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA)

Yao Wu is the inaugural Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art at the Smith College Museum of Art, where she oversees the museum’s growing collection of approximately 2,000 objects from East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. She has received graduate training in art history from Williams College and Stanford University. She served as the inaugural Asian Art Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City from 2007 to 2009. During her time at Stanford from 2009 to 2015, she served as the Mellon Fellow for curatorial research in Asian art at the university’s Cantor Arts Center. Since her appointment at Smith in 2015, she has organized more than a dozen exhibitions featuring subjects ranging from Chinese painting to Indonesian contemporary video, from Japanese export lacquer to Buddhist art as a transcultural phenomenon.