Geremie R.Barmé is a historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, translator, and web-journal editor who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early modern period (1600s) to the present. In 2016, he founded China Heritage, an online platform for the advocacy of “New Sinology.” Prior to that, he was Founding Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World and a Professor of Chinese History at The Australian National University (ANU).
Barmé is the author of Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (M.E. Sharpe, 1996), In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (Columbia University Press, 1999), The Forbidden City (Harvard University Press, 2008), and other books. His book An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975) (University of California Press, 2002) was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize for Modern China in 2004. Barmé was the Associate Director and main writer of The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary for Frontline (1995). He was also the co-director and co-producer of the documentary film Morning Sun (2003), which the American Historical Association awarded the 2004 John E. O’Conner Film Award. In 2012, he founded The China Story Project, which produces a Yearbook on contemporary China.
After graduating from ANU, where he majored in Chinese and Sanskrit, Barmé studied at universities in the People’s Republic of China from 1974 to 1977 and Japan from 1980 to 1983 and spent long periods working as a journalist, freelance writer, Chinese essayist, and translator in Hong Kong and China.
The two main projects he is working on at the moment are “Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium” and “The Tower of Reading,” both produced by China Heritage.
