Andrew J. Nathan

WEAI congratulates Andrew J. Nathan,
for receiving the 47th Annual Mark van Doren Award on May 7, 2008. The van Doren Award is given to one teacher in the College by students for his or her commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for humanity, devotion to truth, and inspiring leadership.

Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor 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. He is engaged in longterm research and writing on Chinese foreign policy and on sources of political legitimacy in Asia, the latter research based on data from the Asian Barometer Survey, a multi-national collaborative survey research project active in eighteen countries in Asia.

Nathan is chair of the steering committee of the Center for the Study of Human Rights and chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science, 2003-2006, chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2002-2003, and director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 1991-1995. Off campus, he is co-chair of the board, Human Rights in China, a member of the board of Freedom House, and a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, which he chaired , 1995-2000 . He is the regular Asia book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary China, China Information, and others. He is a member of 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.

Nathan’s books 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, co-edited with Perry Link (New York: PublicAffairs, 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, co-authored with Bruce Gilley (New York: New York Review Books, 2002, second edition 2003); Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization, co-edited with Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, and Kavita Philip (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003); How East Asians View Democracy, co-edited with Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, and Doh Chull Shin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and the second edition of The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, co-authored with Andrew Scobell (Columbia University Press, scheduled for publication in 2009).

Nathan’s articles have appeared in World Politics, Daedalus, The China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Asian Survey , The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. His research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and others. He has directed five National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars.

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 has been at Columbia University since 1971.

Email: ajn1@columbia.edu