In Memory

Abstract

In Memory Stephen R. Platt Jonathan Spence (1936–2021) On Christmas Day of 2021, our community lost Jonathan Spence, the founding editor of this journal and a historian of Late Imperial China whose books pulsed with life and emotion. His influence went well beyond his immediate field—he was one of the few historians of China to be elected president of the American Historical Association—and he was best known for character-centered histories built around individuals into whose lives readers from all walks of life could become lost and transported. They were historical works of unsurpassed literary power, where every word on the page seemed to matter. Many readers of this journal may point to one of his books as being the magnet that first drew them into the field of Chinese history. In the course of forty years at Yale, Jonathan taught more than sixty PhD students as well as multitudes of undergraduates who went on to China-related careers in academia and elsewhere. His Modern China survey was one of the most popular classes in the entire university—"Spence," the students called it—and several hundred would sign up whenever he taught it, filling the traditional lecture halls to overflowing and forcing the university to move the course to churches and other more capacious venues. Jonathan was an entrancing speaker with a rich British accent. He looked like Sean Connery, though his eyebrows were more expressive. To a student watching him up at the lectern, he seemed the Hollywood archetype of a tweedy history professor. He could be intimidating, but didn't mean to be. To the eye of a graduate student, he had distinctive accessories that seemed somehow to define him as a teacher—his soft leather briefcase, the thick pad of paper he kept by the side of his chair, the pencils (never pens) he used to write comments. And there were the glimpses of his playful, informal side as well, like the giant poster of major-league pitcher Greg Maddux that hung from his office wall. Or his much-adored and lavishly spoiled little Scottish terrier Maddux, named after said pitcher, whose grey beard matched Jonathan's almost perfectly. [End Page vi] The agon around Jonathan was always between presence and distance: his need, on the one hand, to escape into isolation to think and write, to immerse himself in his sources and his visions—what he called in one of his books "the aloneness that always comes over me when I write"—and set against that, his central role in the Yale history department, which required his constant presence and attention to others. If it seemed at times like he might have preferred to disappear permanently into the imaginative worlds of history and literature, his professional responsibilities—and of course his loving relationship with his wife, Annping Chin—kept him anchored in the here and now. As a graduate student I could never understand how he managed to read so much in the field, and serve on committees, and teach the hundreds of undergraduates who sought him out every year—a crowd of them would line the halls in the basement of Timothy Dwight College whenever he held office hours—and still get his own writing done. He was a regular presence on campus yet still found the time to write more prolifically than any historian I knew. One of the secrets to his productivity was a stunning ability to read. It seemed to take him no time at all to finish a book, an article, a paper—though he read more slowly when he was reviewing a book, he said, because you had to respect the years of labor that the scholar had put into it. His gift for voracious reading was paired with an ingrained (shall we say English, or old-fashioned) conscientiousness that made him a punctual responder, a principled correspondent, a keeper of deadlines. He set a model of professionalism for his graduate students in the promptness with which he wrote letters and read drafts, and how closely he kept up with (and complimented) the work of younger scholars from other institutions. Books were not on the syllabus or...