Deirdre
Chetham, the author of Before the
Deluge: The Vanishing World of the
Yangzte's Gorges (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) has been the executive
director of the Harvard University Asia Center since its founding in 1997,
and from 1997 to 2000 served concurrently as the executive director of the
Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. Ms. Chetham spent the previous
decade as a US Foreign Service Officer, last serving as the Burma Country
Officer and Narcotics Coordinator for the Bureau of East Asia and the
Pacific for the US Department of State. Prior to that, her overseas
assigments included Beijing and East Berlin.
Ms. Chetham
received her AB from Harvard University in East Asian Languages and
Civilizations. After graduate studies in Chinese anthropology at Columbia
University, Ms. Chetham worked for Lindblad Travel in the early 1980s,
organizing trips throughout the PRC and lecturing on Chinese history on a
Yangtze cruise ship sailing between Shanghai and Chongqing. She has in the
past been a regular contributor to the National Geographic News Service,
Gemini News Service in London, and Radio Netherlands International. Ms.
Chetham was a 1994-95 fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College,
an asssociate in research at the Fairbank Center in 1996, and a writer in
residence at the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, NY in 2001.
