Ezra Feivel Vogel, one of the nation’s leading authorities on East Asia, is the featured speaker of the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute on Thursday, July 24. Professor Vogel’s talk, presented at 7:30 p.m. at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, is entitled Understanding Modern China: Deng Xiaoping and His Successors.

Mr. Vogel is Henry Ford II professor of the social sciences emeritus at Harvard University, and has twice served as director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies. From 1993 to 1995, he served the U.S. as national intelligence officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council.

His book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America was published in 1979 and still holds the record in Japan as the all-time best-seller of nonfiction by a Western author. His most recent book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China has been described as “a masterful new history of China’s reform era,” by the Washington Post.

Admission to speaker programs of the Summer Institute is $20, at the door. For more information, visit mvsummerinstitute.com.