Jonathan Spence
Presidential Address
Cliffhanger Days: A Chinese Family in the Seventeenth Century
In Memoriam
Read In Memoriam, Perspectives, March
Jonathan D. Spence (August 11, –December 25, )
Biography
From the Presidential Biography booklet
By Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., University of California, Berkeley
Jonathan D. Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, was born in England on August 11, , the son of Dermot and Muriel Crailsham Spence. His was a lettered family. Professor Spence’s maternal grandfather taught at Clifton College in Bristol during the Great War, and his mother, who attended finishing school in London, was a passionate student of French language and literature. Dermot Spence had attended Oxford and Heidelberg universities in the late s and spoke excellent German. He also worked at a publishing house and art gallery, and was editor of one of Joseph Conrad’s works. One of Jonathan Spence’s two older brothers was a classicist and the other a chemical engineer. His sister, a filmmaker, is also a professional translator of French, German, and Italian.
When he was 13, Professor Spence matriculated at Winchester Col
Jonathan Spence (–)
Jonathan Spence, a pathbreaking historian of China and former AHA president, died on December 25, , from complications of Parkinson’s. Jonathan received his PhD from Yale University in and taught there until retiring in His numerous honors included a MacArthur fellowship and 10 honorary degrees. His many books, typically told through a biographical lens, showed us Ming intellectuals, Qing emperors, and 20th-century revolutionaries but also brought to life forgotten people; one celebrated book, The Death of Woman Wang (Viking Press, ), used just a few fragmentary sources to re-create the world of a peasant woman murdered by her husband in an impoverished 17th-century county. His wonderfully readable textbook, The Search for Modern China (Norton, ), emerged from his lectures in what was, year after year, one of Yale’s most popular courses.
At a conference honoring Jonathan’s career, several of his former graduate students raised an odd question: Had we been scared of Jonathan while studying with him? Nobody thought that he ever tried to be intimidating, but some nonetheless recalled that they couldn’t help being overwhelmed by Jonathan’s accomplish
THE CHINA SCHOLAR
Jonathan Spence, the 39th Jefferson Lecturer, is our foremost scholar of Chinese history. Known for his literary craftsmanship as well as groundbreaking research, he has in his numerous books and articles achieved the unlikely feat of improving Western understanding of Chinese history and culture. His magnum opus, The Search for Modern China, is the standard textbook in Chinese history courses, while his other works distill and throw light on a wonderful array of periods and figures, both modern and medieval, great and small, Eastern and Western.
JIM LEACH: You were born in Surrey, England, attended Winchester College and then Clare College, Cambridge. You showed a literary bent, studied European history, and came to Yale to study. Then you switched to Chinese history. Why?
JONATHAN SPENCE: Well, it’s probably one of the most complicated decisions I’ve made. It wouldn’t have happened, as far as I can tell, unless I had gotten an exchange fellowship to the United States. I had never really studied Asia, except peripherally where it happened to impinge on British imperial history.
In , I got offered a two–year fellowship to do a master’s degree. I
Jonathan D. Spence
Jonathan Dermot Spence is an English-born American historian, sinologist, and writer specialising in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from to His most widely read book is The Search for Modern China, a survey of the last several hundred years of Chinese history based on his popular course at Yale. A prolific author, reviewer, and essayist, he has published more than a dozen books on China. He retired from Yale in
Source:
British-born historian
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