Jonathan Spence

British-American · 1936 to 2021

Jonathan Spence was born on August 11, 1936, in Surrey, England, to Muriel and Dermot Spence, and educated at Winchester College before two years of national service with the British Army in Germany. He read history at Clare College, Cambridge, then won a Mellon Fellowship that took him to Yale, where he earned a doctorate in Chinese history in 1965 under the historian Mary C. Wright. While training under the scholar Fang Chao-ying, he was given the Chinese name Shi Jingqian, its characters chosen to honor Sima Qian, the ancient father of Chinese historiography. Spence joined Yale's faculty and stayed for more than forty years, becoming Sterling Professor of History in 1993 and retiring in 2008. His course on modern Chinese history, built around the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people caught inside vast political change, became one of Yale's most popular lectures and the basis for his bestselling survey, The Search for Modern China. He wrote more than a dozen books on Chinese history, among them Emperor of China, The Death of Woman Wang, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and God's Chinese Son, most of them built from the same method: letting the documented details of individual lives carry the weight of a whole era. He married Helen Alexander in 1962 and had two sons, Colin and Ian, before later marrying the historian Annping Chin. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 2000, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1988, and served as president of the American Historical Association from 2004 to 2005. Jonathan Spence died on December 25, 2021, at his home in West Haven, Connecticut, from complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of eighty-five.