| 1 | Name: | Dr. Ying-shih Yu | |
| Institution: | Princeton University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2004 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1930 | ||
| Death Date: | August 1, 2021 | ||
An influential teacher and prolific author, Ying-shih Yu has long earned international recognition as the pre-eminent scholar of Chinese history. The breadth of his research, ranging from views of life and death in first and second-century China, through intellectual history and political culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to eighteenth through twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, is staggering. In his work he combines close and subtle scrutiny of fresh source materials to broad generalization about main themes in Chinese history and culture. His research on a merchant ethos in Chinese society from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, for example, has been influential in articulating the belief in a Confucian work ethic in modern East Asian countries. In May 2001 a group of his former students gathered in Princeton for an unusually stimulating two-day conference on topics ranging over more than two thousand years of Chinese history. Born in China in 1930, Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962 and served as assistant professor there from 1969-77 before moving to Yale University as Charles Seymour Professor of History. In 1987 he joined the faculty of Princeton University as Professor of Chinese Studies and History and became Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies Emeritus in 2001. Dr. Yu's many written works include Views of Life and Death in Late Han China (1962); Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (1967); Fang I-chih wan chieh k'ao (The Death of Fang I-chih), 1611-1671 (1972); "Intellectual Breakthroughs in the Tang-Sung Tradition"; "'O Soul, Come Back!' A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China"; Intellectual History in Late Imperial China: Modern Interpretations (1984); Shih yu Chung-kuo wen-hua (History of Chinese Culture) (1987); and The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century. With fellow APS member John Hope Franklin, Dr.Yu shared the 2006 John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity. He was elected a member of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan in 1974 and of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. He died on August 1, 2021 in Princeton, NJ. | |||