Covering Communist and Post-Communist States: A Conversation with Katie Stallard and Adam Brookes

This event will focus on Stallard's experiences reporting from Russia and China for SkyNews and Brookes's time reporting from Beijing for the BBC, as well as the books they have written that draw in part on their work as foreign correspondents. The speakers will also bring in comparative comments relating to reporting they did from and about other places, ranging from North Korea in Stallard's case to Washington, D.C., and Afghanistan in that of Brookes. The discussion will be moderated by Jeffrey Wasserstrom of UCI's History Department who is one the faculty lecturers in the current Humanities Core cycle, which focuses on "World Building" traditions in varied times and places.

Stallard, who currently writes about China as well as Russia for the New Statesman is the author of Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea (Oxford University Press, 2022), an FT politics book of the year.
Brookes, now a full-time book author has written three spy novels and a debut work of nonfiction, Fragile Cargo: China's Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City, which was published to strong reviews in the U.K. last year and will be published in the U.S. by Simon and Shuster on February 14, 2023.

Wasserstrom is the author of books such as Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020).

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