Elliot Sperling is Associate Professor of Tibetan Studies in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He has written widely on Tibetan history and Sino-Tibetan relations and has received MacArthur and Fulbright fellowships. From 1996 to 1999 he served on the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad.Mickey Spiegel has been with Human Rights Watch since 1990 with responsibilities for work on China and Tibet. Among the many reports she has authored and co-authored are a series on religious freedom in the People's Republic of China, a directory of political prisoners, and profiles of Tibetans in exile. An anthropologist by training, she holds a Masters of Philosophy from Columbia University. She is a trained social worker who has implemented programs in rural Alaska, among Native Americans, and in inner city areas in the U.S. Ms. Spiegel is a member of the Association of Asian Studies, the American Anthropological Association, and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Steven Marshall was born in 1951 in the United States. He has paid numerous visits to Tibetan areas inside and outside the Tibet Autonomous Region since 1986. His book Hostile Elements: A Study of Political Imprisonment in Tibet: 1987-1998 was published by the Tibet Information Network. He is also the co-author, with Dr. Susette Cooke, of a CD-ROM entitled Tibet Outside the TAR.
Orville Schell has written fourteen books, nine of them about China. His most recent is Mandate of Heaven published by Simon & Schuster. He has also served as a television commentator for ABC-TV, CBS-TV, and NBC-TV and has worked both as a correspondent and consultant for a number of PBS Frontline documentaries and an Emmy award-winning program for 60 Minutes.
The winner of several writing fellowships and numerous prestigious awards, he is a long time contributor to The New Yorker, as well as to such magazines and periodicals as The Atlantic, Granta, Newsweek, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books.
Mr. Schell has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and traveled widely in China. He serves on the boards of the Yale-China Association and Human Rights Watch and is a member of the Pacific Council and the Council of Foreign Relations. He is currently Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley where he is also Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies.