Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture
The 2024-2025 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture (recording available)
The East Asia Program was honored to have Patricia Ebrey, Professor Emeritus, History, University of Washington to give the 2024-2025 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture “From Research Assistants to Professors: Scholars from China as Experts on China, 1920-1960.”
View the lecture recording HERE.
Lecture description: This talk will look at the growth of China studies as an academic field in the US with attention to its changing demography. China Studies was tiny in the 1920s, with few colleges offering anything, and returned missionaries or their children the main teachers. Graduate students were often sent to Europe, where Sinological training was more advanced. World War II brought more American men into the field, but the Cold War had even greater impact as the US government decided not to send Chinese foreign students back to China and funded numerous research projects that allowed many to retrain as China experts. That gave them time to find academic jobs as US higher education gradually expanded. The growing presence of faculty members who had grown up in China, while never part of a strategic plan, is one reason that the US leaped ahead of Europe in Sinological studies by the 1960s.
Bio: Patricia Buckley Ebrey is professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington. Her scholarship has focused on the imperial period, especially the Song dynasty. Among her best-known books are The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (1993), The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (1996), and Emperor Huizong (2014). Her most recent book is a co-authored set of translations, Chinese Autobiographical Writing (2023).
History and Background
In 2014 on the 100th anniversary of Hu Shih's graduation from Cornell, EAP initiated an annual distinguished lecture in honor of the philosopher and statesman. Leading scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies are invited to speak on critical issues in their field of research. These lectures are archived as a resource for the Cornell community and beyond. Learn more about one of Cornell's most distinguished alumni, Hu Shih.
- Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture videos and programs are permanently archived in the Cornell eCommons.
Past Hu Shih Distinguished Lectures
- 2024-2025 - Patricia Ebrey (History, University of Washington), "From Research Assistants to Professors: Scholars from China as Experts on China, 1920-1960"
- 2023-2024 - Haun Saussy (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago) "Exile As Formative Experience in Classical Chinese Poetry"
- 2022-2023 - Michael Nylan (History, UC Berkeley ) "Majority Rule and Consortial Policymaking: The Evidence from Early China"
- 2021-2022 - Tim Brook (History, University of British Columbia), "Government for the People: Troubling Legacies of the Confucian Statecraft Tradition"
- 2020-2021 - Meir Shahar (East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University), "Chinese Animal Gods"
- 2019-2020 - Dorothy Ko (History, Barnard College), "Gender and Material Culture: The Female Artisan Gu Erniang and the Craft of Inkstone-Making in Early Modern China"
- 2018-2019 - Victor Mair (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania), "An Important Dunhuang Manuscript Formerly in the Possession of Hu Shih: Transformation Text on the Subduing of Demons"
- 2017-2018 - Steven Sangren (Anthropology, Cornell University), "Filial Piety and Its Discontents"
- 2016-2017 - Francesca Bray (Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh), "Hail the Maintainers: Rethinking Technology in Chinese History"
- 2015-2016 - Evelyn Rawski (History, University of Pittsburgh), "Moving from Nation to Region: China in Northeast Asian History"
2014-2015 - Benjamin Elman (East Asian Studies, Princeton University), "The Great Reversal: China, Korea, and Japan in the Early Modern World"
Hu Shih, the Greatest Cornellian
Sherman Cochran, the Hu Shih Professor Emeritus of Chinese History, presented the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative's inaugural lecture on November 20, 2015, making the case for Hu Shih '14 as the "greatest Cornellian." Cochran framed his lecture as a comparison between Hu Shih and other Cornell graduates, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg '54, novelist Thomas Pynchon '59, and professional football player and actor Ed Marinaro '72. Read more about the event.
