Ross Terrill is a China specialist and Research Associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. He is the author of ten books, including The New Chinese Empire (2004), China In Our Time (1992), and Wo yu Zhongguo (Myself and China) (published in Chinese in Beijing, 2011). Among his other books are Socialism as Fellowship: R. H. Tawney and His Times (1973), 800,000,000: The Real China (1974), Flowers on an Iron Tree (1976), Mao: A Biography (1985, revised edition 2000), and Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon (2000).

Professor Terrill is a contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. For a decade he was an Atlantic Monthly contributing editor. He won the National Magazine Award for Reporting Excellence, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the George Polk Memorial Award for his writing on China.

Recently, Professor Terrill has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and Monash University in Australia. In 2008, he was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.