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Johns Hopkins SAIS Names New American Co-Director of Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China

Washington, DC and Nanjing, China—The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) has named Adam Webb as the incoming American Co-Director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China, effective January 2019.

“As a long-standing Hopkins-Nanjing faculty member, Adam Webb brings deep knowledge and experience to his new role as the American Co-Director, and we are delighted that he will fill this important role,” said China Studies Director Andrew Mertha.

Webb has served on the faculty of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center as Professor of Political Science since 2008. His research interests encompass political thought, globalization, and critiques of modernity, and his research has addressed topics including social movements, alternative development, and the rise of China. He holds a PhD in politics from Princeton University and has previously taught at Princeton and Harvard, and served as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.   

“After ten years on the faculty at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, I am looking forward to taking on this new role as Co-Director,” Webb said. “It is an exciting time to take part in supporting the Center’s accomplishments and building on the successes of its first three decades.”

Webb succeeds American Co-Director David Davies, who has served as the American Co-Director since 2016. "David Davies has been an exemplary leader of the Center and has expertly navigated it through a particularly challenging period of US-China relations,” Mertha said.

The Hopkins-Nanjing Center was founded in 1986 as a bilingual educational collaboration between JHU and Nanjing University, with day-to-day management led jointly by the American and the Chinese Co-Directors. For more than thirty years the HNC has trained graduates who contribute to Sino-global relations across a variety of fields. A dedicated space for free and open academic exploration and intellectual dialogue, the HNC houses an open-stack research library considered one of China’s top collections on international affairs.

As a unique shared academic and residential community that emphasizes “target language” content courses, American and other international students at the HNC take most courses in Chinese, while Chinese students take most courses in English. An additional number of bilingual classes, along with Chinese and international roommate pairings and numerous extracurricular activities, also provide opportunities for students to study together and exchange ideas within and beyond the curriculum. 

For more information about the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, visit sais.hu.edu/hnc.

Media Contact:
Jason Lucas
Johns Hopkins SAIS
office: +1 (202) 663-5620
mobile: +1 (202) 422-2652
[email protected]