Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette, a writer on international affairs, is the United Nations correspondent of The Nation, a contributing writer/editor at PassBlue.com, a columnist for India Abroad and author of several books on Asia. She was The New York Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia from 1984 to 1991 and later the Times bureau chief at the UN. In 1991, Ms. Crossette won the George Polk Award for foreign reporting for her coverage of the assassination in India of a former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi. In 1998, she won the annual prize for international reporting from InterAction, a coalition of more than 150 international nonprofit aid and development organizations. In 2008 she received a Fulbright Award for contributions to international understanding and in 2010, she won the Shorenstein Prize, awarded jointly by research centers at Harvard and Stanford universities, for writings on Asia that enhanced understanding of the region in the West. Ms. Crossette is the author of India Facing the 21st Century and So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, as well as a book of travel essays, The Great Hill Stations of Asia. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is one of the authors of the 2009 survey of global stakeholders, Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World, published by Lexington Books and the Stanley Foundation. In 2010 and 2011, Ms. Crossette reported and wrote the State of World Population reports for the United Nations Population Fund, the first focused on women in post-conflict areas and the second on the world at 7 billion. Ms. Crossette has been an adjunct faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a Fulbright teaching fellow at Punjab University in India, the Ferris Visiting Professor on Politics and the Press at Princeton University, and a lecturer at Bard College. In 2003, she led a journalism workshop in Phnom Penh for writers and editors from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. She was a Knight International Press Fellow for 2004-2005 in Brazil, and in 2008 she worked with Cambodian journalists covering the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the publications advisory board of the Foreign Policy Association, a trustee of the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs and a senior fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York .