UC Berkeley Journalism - Faculty - Orville Schell Biography

Orville Schell was born in New York City in 1940, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University, and did his M.A. and Ph.D work at the University of California, Berkeley, in Chinese History. He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and travelled widely in China.

He is a long time contributor to The New Yorker, as well as to such magazines and periodicals as The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Newsweek, The China Quarterly, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books.

The winner of several writing fellowships (including ones from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies center) and numerous awards (including the Overseas Press Club of America's award for the best article on a foreign subject and the Page One Award for the best investigative story).

Mr. Schell has also written fifteen books, eleven of them about China. His most recent is "Mandate of Heaven" published by Simon & Schuster. He has also served as a television commentator for ABC-TV, CBS-TV, and NBC-TV and has worked both as correspondent and consultant for a number PBS "Frontline" documentaries and an Emmy award winning program for "60 minutes."

He serves on the boards of the Yale-China Association and Human Rights Watch and is a member of the Pacific Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley where he is also a Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies. He lives on a cattle ranch in Northern California with his Beijing-born wife and three children.

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