Barbara Crossette, a writer on foreign affairs and author of several books on Asia, was The New York Times bureau chief at the United Nations from 1994 to 2001 and earlier a Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia. She has also been a diplomatic correspondent in Washington and has reported for the Times from Central America, the Caribbean and Canada. In New York, she has been deputy foreign editor and senior editor in charge of the Times’ weekend news operations. Before joining the newspaper  in 1973, Ms. Crossette worked for The Evening and Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia and The Birmingham Post in Birmingham, England. 

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 25-year achievement award of The Silurians, a society of New York journalists, and the annual prize for international reporting from InterAction, a coalition of more than 150 international nonprofit aid and development organizations. In 1999, she received the Business Council of the United Nations’ Korn Ferry Award for outstanding reporting on the organization, and in 2003 the United Nations Correspondents’ Association’s lifetime achievement award. In 2008, she was awarded a Fulbright prize for contributions to international understanding. 

Ms. Crossette is the author of India Facing the 21^st 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. 

Ms. Crossette has been a member of the adjunct faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a Fulbright teaching fellow in journalism at Punjab University in Chandigarh, India. In 1994, she was the Ferris Visiting Professor on Politics and the Press at Princeton University. She has also taught seminars on international affairs for Bard College. In 2003 and 2008, she led workshops in journalism at the Royal University of Phnom Penh for writers and editors from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. She was a Knight International Press Fellow for 2004-2005 in Brazil. 

Born in Philadelphia, Ms. Crossette received a B.A. in history and political science in 1963 from Muhlenberg College, where she is now a member of the Board of Observers. A trustee of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, she is also a contributing writer for World Policy Journal  in New York.  She is a board member of the Correspondents Fund in New York and a member of the publications advisory committee at the Foreign Policy Association.