Jonathan Spence

Jonathan Dermot Spence
Born	August 11, 1936 (1936-08-11) Surrey, England
Citizenship	American
Fields	Chinese history
Institutions	Yale University
Alma mater	Cambridge, Yale
Doctoral advisor	Arthur F. Wright and Mary C. Wright
Doctoral students	Tonio Andrade, Peter Carroll, James Carter, Janet Chen, Sherman Cochran, Pamela Crossley, Roger DesForges, Ryan Dunch, C. Patterson Giersch, Madeline Y. Hsu, Robert A. Kapp, Norman Kutcher, Susan Naquin, Robert Oxnam, Stephen R. Platt, Kenneth Pomeranz, Johanna Ransmeier, Ruth Rogaski, Roger R. Thompson, Joanna Waley-Cohen, Yi-Li Wu

Jonathan D. Spence (Self-adopted Chinese name: simplified Chinese: 史景迁; traditional Chinese: 史景遷; pinyin: Shǐ Jǐngqiān, born August 11, 1936) is a British-born historian and public intellectual specializing in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. His most famous book is The Search for Modern China, which has become one of the standard texts on the last several hundred years of Chinese history. A prolific author, reviewer, and essayist, he has written a dozen books on China. He retired from Yale in 2008.

In May and June 2008, he gave the 60th anniversary Reith Lectures, which were broadcasted on BBC Radio 4.

Spence's major interest is modern China and, especially, its relations with the West. A notable recurring theme in Spence's work is the use of biographies to examine the wider cultural history of China. Another common theme to Spence's work is his interests in efforts on the part of both Westerners and Chinese to Westernize China, and why such efforts have failed.

Education

Spence was educated at Winchester College, an English independent school for boys, and at Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He received his B.A. in history from Cambridge in 1959. He went to Yale on a Clare-Mellon Fellowship to study the history and culture of China, receiving an M.A. and then a Ph.D. in 1965, when he won the John Addison Porter Prize.

History

Widely recognized as a leading scholar of Chinese history, Spence was president of the American Historical Association for the 2004-2005 term. While his primary focus has been on medieval China, he has also written a biography of Mao Zedong and Treason by the Book, exploring an intriguing episode of 18th-century history. Spence taught a popular undergraduate class at Yale on the history of Modern China 1600-2007 (offered every other spring semester).

Honors

Spence has received eight honorary degrees in the United States as well as from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and (in 2003) from Oxford University. He was invited to become a visiting professor at Peking University and an honorary professor at Nanjing University. He was named Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, and, in 2006, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

He received the William C. DeVane Medal of the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1952); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979); the Los Angeles Times History Prize (1982), and the Vursel Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1983). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), named a MacArthur Fellow (1988), appointed to the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress (1988), elected a member of the American Philosophical Society (1993), and named a corresponding fellow of the British Academy (1997).

In 2010, he was appointed to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture at the Library of Congress, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Family

Born in Surrey, England, Spence became an American citizen in 2000. He lives in West Haven with his wife, Annping Chin (a Senior Lecturer in History at Yale who got her PhD in Classical Chinese Philosophy at Columbia). He has two sons from a previous marriage (1962–1993) to Helen Alexander, Colin and Ian Spence, and two stepchildren, Yar Woo and Mei Chin.

Bibliography

Books

• The Search for Modern China
• Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi (1974)
• The Death of Woman Wang (1978)
• To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960 (1980)
• The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984)
• The Question of Hu (1987)
• Chinese Roundabout: Essays on History and Culture
• The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980
• The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds
• God's Chinese Son (1996)
• Mao Zedong (1999)
• Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (2007) Viking, 332 pages. ISBN 978-0-670-06357-4
• Treason by the Book

Book Reviews

• "The Dream of Catholic China" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 22-24 [reviews Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724]

References

• Mazlish, Bruce "The Question of Hu" pages 143-152 from History and Theory, Volume 31, 1992.
• Mirsky, Jonathan Review of Chinese Roundabout pages 51–53 from The New York Review of Books, Volume 39, Issue #17, November 5, 1992.
• Nathan, Andrew J. "A Culture of Cruelty: Review of The Search for Modern China" pages 30–34 from The New Republic, Volume 203, July 30, 1990.
• Roberts, Priscilla "Spence, Jonathan D." pages 1136-1137 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing edited by Kelly Boyd, Volume 2, London:Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999 ISBN 1-884964-33-8.

External links

• Biography
• The Search for Modern China Continues
• 2008 Reith Lectures
• Spence archive from The New York Review of Books
• Jonathan Spence, Cliffhanger Days: A Chinese Family in the Seventeenth Century, AHA Presidential Address Retrieved 18 April 2010
• profile at the New York State Writers Institute