Philip A. Kuhn

Philip A. Kuhn
Born	September 9, 1933
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	United States
Fields	Qing history Overseas Chinese history
Institutions	University of Chicago Harvard University
Alma mater	Harvard University Georgetown University
Doctoral advisor	John King Fairbank
Doctoral students	Timothy Brook, Prasenjit Duara, William C. Kirby, Hans van de Ven

Philip A. Kuhn (Chinese name: simplified Chinese: 孔飞力, 孔复礼; traditional Chinese: 孔飛力, 孔復禮; pinyin: Kǒng Fēilì, born September 9, 1933) is an American academic, sinologist and the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Emeritus, at Harvard University.^[1]

Personal life

Kuhn is the elder son of Ferdinand and Delia Kuhn, to whom he dedicated his first book. Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr. had been bureau chief of the London Office of the New York Times and later served at the Washington Post. Delia Kuhn was a writer who served as information director of the Office of Community War Services during World War II.^[2]

Kuhn attended Woodrow Wilson High School and then received his A.B. from Harvard College. Later he received his M.A. from Georgetown University, and Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, where his dissertation advisor was John K. Fairbank. He enlisted in the United States Army, serving from 1955–1958. He married Sally Cheng (程吾） in the 1960s and had one son, Anthony Kuhn, the American journalist and current NPR correspondent.^[3] That marriage dissolved in 1980. He also had a daughter, Deborah W. Kuhn, with his second and now former wife Mary L. Smith.

Academic career

Kuhn taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1978^[1] where he attained the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of History. While at Chicago, Kuhn published in 1970 Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 as part of the Harvard East Asian monograph series, which led to his being granted tenure and a full professorship. Three of Kuhn's numerous graduate students at the University of Chicago received doctorates but none continued in academics. However, Kuhn's prominent student, Prasenjit Duara, began his studies with Kuhn at Chicago before following him to Harvard.

In 1978 Kuhn returned to Harvard, where he succeeded his teacher John King Fairbank.^[4]

In 1980-1986, Kuhn served as director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.^[5]

A pioneer of social history in Chinese history, Kuhn also helped re-examine the "impact-response" school of Western scholarship on China. Frederic Wakeman in a review in The New York Review of Books described Kuhn as "one of the West's premier China historians."^[6] His students hold professorships at universities in Asia, North America, and Europe. Among the most prominent are: Prasenjit Duara, formerly at University of Chicago, now the National University of Singapore; Timothy Brook, the Principal of St. John's College at University of British Columbia; William C. Kirby, the former Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Hans van de Ven, head of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Philip Kuhn, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 30+ works in 90+ publications in 7 languages and 2,900+ library holdings.^[7] Kuhn published numerous articles and five books, as well as chapters in Cambridge History of China.

• Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 (1970)
• 中华帝国晚期的叛乱及其敌人: 1796-1864年的军事化与社会結构 (1970)
• Introduction to Chʻing Documents (1986)
• Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (1990)
• National Polity and Local Power: The Transformation of Late Imperial China (1990), with Timothy Brook and Min Tu-ki
• The Homeland: Thinking About the History of Chinese Overseas (1997)
• Origins of the modern Chinese State (1999)
• 叫魂 (2000)
• Chinese Among Others (2000).

Notes

References

• Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University: a Fifty Year History, 1955-2005. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 10-ISBN 097679800X/13-ISBN 9780976798002; OCLC 64140358