Jay Taylor, former Director of Analysis for Asia and Pacific Affairs at the State Department and a staff member of the White House National Security Council for East Asia, is currently a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. He obtained his MA in Far Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan and BA from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Generalissimo's Son: Chiang Ching-kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan (Harvard, 2000), and The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Harvard, 2009). 

Taylor will give a talk on Chiang Kai-shek's role in modern and contemporary China. For historians, a new, balanced, more complex, and uniquely sourced examination of the life of Chiang Kai-shek may reshape the history of the rise of communism and the failure of democracy in China. For political scientists, it may suggest that the vision that drives China today is that of Chiang Kai-shek, not Mao Zedong.