jonathan spence the search for modern china

Spence always said he was a “convert” to Chinese history. He did military service for two years in Germany and then went up to Clare College Cambridge, where he coedited the highly regarded literary magazine Granta. He had his secondary schooling at Winchester, where he won the history prize. His narrative gift made him what Peter Perdue, professor emeritus of history, called a “master craftsman” who “created a new amalgam of biography, documentary, literature, and drama.”īorn in England in 1936, Jonathan Dermot Spence was one of four children of a family immersed in art, literature, and publishing.

With a novelist’s aptitude for character, detail, and pace, he brought the sweep of a distant civilization to life. When he started writing in the 1960s, the American eye was not on China. His gift was to blend scrupulous archival research with literary flair to create narratives that illuminate the vibrancy of human lives in a foreign land. Galvanized at first by the idea of China in the 17 th century, he went on to write 14 books that spanned the entirety of modern Chinese history, among them “The Search for Modern China” (1990). Spence transformed and popularized the study of China in the United States and across the world. Levin, president of Yale from 1993 to 2013, spoke of him as “a towering figure, a scholar of unique insight and imagination.” President Peter Salovey, noting the community’s loss, called him “unsurpassed as scholar and teacher,” and Richard C. 25 at home in West Haven, Connecticut of complications from Parkinson’s disease. Jonathan Spence ’65 Ph.D., Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, whose scholarship shaped the field of China studies for half a century, died Dec.

Jonathan spence the search for modern china