jonathan spence the search for modern china

He is survived by his wife, retired lecturer of Chinese history Annping Chin, as well as a brother, four children and stepchildren and three grandchildren and step grandchildren.Īn Englishman and graduate of Cambridge University, where he had been a magazine editor, Spence came to Yale in 1959 as a Mellon Fellow and studied under professors Arthur and Mary Wright, the first woman to be a tenured and full professor at Yale.

Spence, 85, died in his West Haven home on Christmas Day after a battle with Parkinson’s disease. “He could ‘catch the essence,’ as he sometimes describes it, of people and of historical moments so they lit up like lightning bugs in a jar.” “No event worth mentioning was too large to be refracted through a single human life and no life was too minor to have its humanity summoned up from the past alongside the abstraction of its historical significance,” his 2009 retirement tribute reads. Former University President Richard Levin called him ”a towering figure, a scholar of unique insight and imagination.” The historian wove narrative detail into larger cultural themes in his lectures, which would become the building blocks for more than a dozen books, including “The Search for Modern China,” a seminal text published in 19990 that informed the field’s next generation.

His courses, which included the “History of Modern China” and “The Qing Dynasty,” had so many interested students that they had to be admitted in separate cohorts during shopping period. Spence, the Sterling Professor emeritus of history who retired in 2009, drew many to Yale and to the study of China. For more than 40 years, Jonathan Spence GRD ’61 GRD ’65 lit up packed lecture halls with vivid stories of emperors and everyday people that brought ancient Chinese history into the present.

Jonathan spence the search for modern china