Events

Friday, November 10 | 3:00 PM

Nasher Museum Auditorium

Duke University

In this Sinica live taping, legendary podcast host Kaiser Kuo will sit down with acclaimed writer Peter Hessler to discuss his work on China and Egypt.

Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo is the host of the Sinica Podcast, the leading English-language podcast on current affairs in China, which he co-founded in 2010. He was the founding lead guitarist of the seminal Chinese heavy metal band Tang Dynasty and continued to be active in rock music in China until 2016. After several years as a reporter covering tech and society in China in the 2000s, he joined Baidu, China’s leading search engine, as director of international communications. Since 2016, when The China Project acquired the Sinica Podcast, he has served as Head of Podcasts and edits and produces several podcasts under The China Project. He lives in Chapel Hill but is neutral when it comes to basketball allegiances.

Peter Hessler

Since 2000, Peter Hessler has been a staff writer at The New Yorker. He first went to live in China’s Sichuan province as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1996 to 1998, an experience that became the subject of his first book, River Town. With Hessler’s next two books, Oracle Bones and Country Driving, he completed a trilogy of reported works that spanned a decade in China. In 2011, he moved with his family to Cairo, where he lived for five years. His fifth book, The Buried, described his experiences during the Egyptian Arab Spring.

In 2019, Hessler returned to China, where he taught for two years at Sichuan University. He also covered the pandemic for The New Yorker, reporting from Wuhan and other cities. This experience is the subject of his newest book, Other Rivers, which will be published summer 2024. Hessler currently lives in southwestern Colorado with his wife, the writer Leslie T. Chang, and their twin daughters

This event is co-sponsored by APSI, the Duke University Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC) and the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) with support from the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Endowment Fund.