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New
Honor for an Old China Hand
May/June 2010
by David
J. Baker ’78PhD
“This
is rather a big lecture for me,” said Jonathan Spence ’65PhD on March 31, in
between visits to the Beinecke and Sterling Library’s map collection to
research an upcoming speech.
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Two generations of undergrads have asked one another “Have you taken Spence yet?”
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“A
big lecture”? Spence is a Sterling Professor Emeritus, a MacArthur Fellow, and
the recipient of honorary degrees from the likes of Oxford and the University
of Hong Kong. Two generations’ worth of undergraduates have asked one another
“Have you taken Spence yet?” as if his courses on Chinese history were
graduation requirements. What kind of lecture could possibly be big for
Jonathan Spence?
Perhaps
the lecture that the U.S. government calls its “highest honor for distinguished
intellectual achievement in the humanities.” Spence has been selected by the
National Endowment for the Humanities to present the 39th annual Jefferson
Lecture on May 20, in Washington, DC. He joins the ranks of such previous
Jefferson lecturers as Arthur Miller, John Updike, Henry Louis Gates Jr. ’73,
Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison.
Spence’s
lecture will be “When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth
Century.” His books have addressed the “discovery” of China by western
travelers in that critical period, but this time he views the process in
reverse, focusing on one of the first Chinese to reach Europe, a
Jesuit-educated linguist named Shen who visited the courts of France and
England in 1680. The research on this little-known figure “has become like a
detective story,” Spence says.  |
