I'm a writer of mostly non-fiction and the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, in New York.

I've written many books, many of them about East Asia, but I'm not a specialist- I've always resisted specialisation. If you want to compress my work into a particular theme, one thing that has always interested me is how people regard themselves in terms of their culture and nationality. This is a running theme through most of my books.