Julian Baird Gewirtz is currently an Academy Scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He completed his doctorate in history in 2018 at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Harvard University Press, 2017), which The Economist called “a gripping read, highlighting what was little short of a revolution in China’s economic thought.” Professionally fluent in Mandarin Chinese, he has written on Asia for publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Caixin, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.
From 2015 to 2016, he was on leave from Oxford and served in the Obama Administration, most recently as special advisor for international affairs to the Deputy Secretary of Energy.
Julian’s poems have been published by AGNI, Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, PEN America, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, and have received recognition from the Academy of American Poets and Best New Poets 2016. His poetry criticism and nonfiction essays have been published by The Economist, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation, and the Washington Post.
Julian received his A.B. degree, summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 2013.