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Speaker: Nara Dillon, Harvard University

Nara Dillon’s research interests include globalization and the politics of welfare, charity, and inequality in China.  In addition to contemporary Chinese social policy, her research examines its origins in the Mao and the pre-revolutionary Republican periods.  Her publications include At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and Statebuilding in Republican Shanghai(Stanford, 2008) and Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective (Harvard, 2015). She has also written articles on civil society, refugee relief, and contemporary welfare reform in China and India.  Dillon received her B.A. in history from Williams College and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2003 to 2007 she taught Chinese politics and comparative politics as an Assistant Professor at Bard College. She has held lecturer appointments in Government, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Social Studies at Harvard since 2008.  Dillon offers courses on China’s economic reforms, global cities in East Asia, and anti-poverty programs in China and other developing countries. Dillon also teaches two junior tutorials for East Asian Studies and Government concentrators: one on the political economy of modern China, and another comparing Chinese and Indian politics.