This year's Annual Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture is titled: From Research Assistants to Professors: Scholars from China as Experts on China, 1920-1960 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Professor Emeritus, History, University of Washington

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.

Patricia Ebrey short 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).

Introduced by TJ Hinrichs (History) and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies).