Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights.

Nathan’s publications include Peking Politics, 1918-1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Chinese Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, co-edited with David Johnson and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Human Rights in Contemporary China, with R. Randle Edwards and Louis Henkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); China's Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security, with Robert S. Ross (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); China's Transition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); The Tiananmen Papers, edited with Perry Link (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); Negotiating Culture and Human Rights: Beyond Universalism and Relativism, co-edited with Lynda S. Bell and Ilan Peleg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files, with Bruce Gilley (New York: New York Review Books, 2002; second edition 2003), and Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization, co-edited with Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, and Kavita Philip (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003). His articles have appeared in World Politics, Daedalus, The China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Asian Survey,The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. His current research involves collaborative survey-based studies of political culture and political participation in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Asian societies.

Born on April 3, 1943, in New York City, Dr. Nathan received his degrees from Harvard University: the B.A. in history, summa cum laude, in 1963; the M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies in 1965; and the Ph.D. in Political Science in 1971. He taught at the University of Michigan in 1970-71 and at Columbia University since 1971. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and others. He has directed four National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars. He served as Director of the East Asian Institute, 1991-1995, Director of Graduate Studies in the Political Science Department, 1997-2002, and chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia, 2002-2003.

Nathan was chair of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, 1995-2000, and continues to serve on this committee and on the board of Human Rights in China. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary China, and China Information, among others. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Association for Asian Studies, and the American Political Science Association. He does frequent interviews for the print and electronic media, has advised on several film documentaries on China, has consulted for business and government, and has published essays and Op-Eds in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere.