Speaker: Ian Johnson, Author; Founder, China Unofficial Archives

More information coming soon.

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher. He has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, writing on the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history.

He was a 2024-2025 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he is writing a new book on China. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and regularly speaks in the media or to public audiences about China. 

He is the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, an online repository of hundreds of samizdat magazines, books, and underground films. This website is a registered (501c3) non-profit that uploads and annotates new movies and publications daily.

His latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.