Bio

John Delury is a historian of China and analyst of US-China relations, the Korean Peninsula and geopolitics of the Asia Pacific. Based in Seoul, he is Senior Fellow of the Asia Society and a visiting research fellow at Ewha Womans University. 

John 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.  His essays can be found in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Statesman, New York Times, and Washington Post, articles in Asian Survey, Journal of Asian Studies, and Journal of Cold War History, and book reviews in Global Asia and American Historical Review.

In 2023, John was selected as the inaugural Tsao Family Prize Fellow in China Studies at the American Academy in Rome. He was invited to remain in Rome as visiting professor of international history and politics at Luiss University in the fall of 2024 and visiting professor of political science at John Cabot University in the spring of 2025. Prior to the Italian sojourn, he spent over a dozen years as Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies. He was promoted to full professor with tenure in 2019 and received the university’s outstanding research award in 2023.

John is a Melvin MS Goo Writing Fellow of the East-West Center, fellow of The Kennan Institute, public intellectual fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations, board member of the Pacific Century Institute, leadership council member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, non-resident fellow of CSIS and the European Centre for North Korean Studies, and member of the Council of Foreign Relations and National Committee on North Korea.

Dr. Delury received his BA, MA, and PhD in history from Yale University, where he studied under Jonathan Spence.