Joseph R. Levenson

Joseph Richmond Levenson (June 10, 1920 – April 6, 1969) was a scholar of Chinese history and Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Joseph Richmond Levenson
BornJune 10, 1920
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died(1969-04-06)April 6, 1969
Russian River, California, U.S.
EducationHarvard University (1949)
Spouse(s)Rosemary Sebag-Montefiore
ChildrenRichard Levenson
Irene Levenson
Thomas Levenson
Leo Levenson
Scientific career
FieldsIntellectual History of China
Notable studentsFrederic E. Wakeman

After graduating from Boston Latin School in 1937 and Harvard College in 1941, Levenson enlisted in the United States Navy in 1942. He attended Japanese Language School and saw active service in the Solomon Islands and Philippines campaigns. After the war he earned M.A. (1947) and PhD (1949) degrees at Harvard, where he was a student of John K. Fairbank. He was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1951 until his death. He drowned in a canoeing accident in the Russian River, California, in 1969. [1]

Honors and awards

Levenson earned a number of awards and prizes, including Fulbright (1954–55), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1958–59); Guggenheim (1962–63); and the American Council of Learned Societies (1966–67).

In honor of his scholarly and pedagogical contributions, two awards are made in his name: the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies offers the Joseph Levenson Book Prize[2] and one by Harvard University for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Intellectual achievements

Paul Cohen commented in his study of American historical writing on China, Discovering History in China, that Levenson addressed "the issues of modernization and cultural change more persistently, imaginatively, and, for many of his readers, persuasively than perhaps any other American historian of China in the immediate postwar decades". [3]

Notes
  1. MeisnerRhoads_Murphey (1976), p. 195-196.
  2. AAS CIAC Levenson Book Prize Winners Archived 2014-07-01 at the Wayback Machine
  3. Cohen (2010), p. 51.

References and further reading
  • Brooks, E. Bruce (2003). "History without Philology (Review) Joseph Levenson and Franz Schurmann. China: An Interpretive History". Warring States Project. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
  • James Cahill, "Joseph Levenson's Role In My Development As A Scholar And Writer."
  • Paul Cohen, Joseph Levenson and the Historiography of the 1950s and 1960s, in —— (2010). Discovering History in China : American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press.

Selected works

Articles and chapters
  • "The Humanistic Disciplines: Will Sinology Do?," The Journal of Asian Studies 23.04 (1964): 507-512.

Books
  • Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China (1953)
  • Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (1958-1965)
  • China: an interpretive history, from the beginnings to the fall of Han (1969)
  • Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: the Western stage and the Chinese stages (1971)
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