John Delury is a historian of modern China and expert on East Asian affairs, focusing on US-China relations and the Korean Peninsula. He is the author of Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China (Cornell University Press, 2022) and co-author with Orville Schell, of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century (Random House, 2013), which was translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In 2023 he was selected as the inaugural Tsao Family Prize Fellow in China Studies at the American Academy in Rome, and was invited as Visiting Professor of International History and Politics at Luiss University in the fall of 2024 and Visiting Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at John Cabot University.
Before relocating to Italy, Dr. Delury was based in Seoul for over a dozen years as Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies. His articles can be found in Asian Survey, Journal of Asian Studies, and Journal of Cold War History, essays in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and Washington Post, and book reviews in Global Asia and American Historical Review. He is a public intellectual fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations, senior fellow of the Asia Society, board member of the Pacific Century Institute, leadership council member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, non-resident fellow at the Sejong Institute, CSIS and European Centre for North Korean Studies, and member of the Council of Foreign Relations and National Committee on North Korea. Delury received his BA, MA, and PhD in history from Yale University.