Emily Parker | Markle
Emily Parker | Markle

Emily Parker

Digital Diplomacy Advisor and Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
Expert Advisor, Rework America

Emily Parker is the author of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground” which was published by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2014. “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are” tells the stories of Internet activists in China, Cuba and Russia. Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote that the book is “a rigorously researched and reported account that reads like a thriller. It’s been a while since I have read a book that is so entertaining, not to mention so encouraging for the culture of liberty.”

Parker is currently digital diplomacy advisor and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Previously, Parker was a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where she covered 21st-century statecraft, innovation, and technology. While at State she advised on issues related to Internet freedom and open government.

She spent over five years working for The Wall Street Journal, first as a writer in Hong Kong and later as a writer and editor in New York. From 2004 to 2005 she wrote a Wall Street Journal column called “Virtual Possibilities: China and the Internet.” She is also a former editor at The New York Times.

Parker is the creator of three digital diplomacy projects: Make Energy: A US-Mexico Innovation Challenge, Green Electronics: A US-China Maker Challenge and Code4Country, the first open government coding marathon between the United States and Russia. Code4Country brought together Russian and American software developers to identify technological solutions to challenges of government transparency. Parker is a former International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an Arthur Ross Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and a Global Policy Fellow at Carnegie Moscow Center, where she researched the role of blogging and social media in today’s Russia.

She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The New Yorker, Politico, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and World Affairs.

Parker has worked in China and Japan, and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish. She graduated with Honors from Brown University with a double major in International Relations and Comparative Literature (French and Spanish). She has a Masters from Harvard in East Asian Studies.