John Hope Franklin, 91, and Yu Ying-shih (ÓàӢʱ), 76, have been named the recipients of the third John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. The two will share the $1 million cash award.
The Kluge prize, dubbed "Nobel Prize" in Humanity,rewards lifetime achievement in the wide range of disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes, including history, philosophy, politics, anthropology, sociology, religion, criticism in the arts and humanities, and linguistics.
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Yu Ying-shih (ÓàӢʱ)
Yu Ying-shih has been described by his peers as ¡°the greatest Chinese intellectual historian of our generation¡± and ¡°the most widely read contemporary historian writing in Chinese.¡± He has written more than 30 books, which span more than 2,000 years of history.
Working deeply with original texts, he has rescued the Confucian heritage from caricature and neglect and has stimulated younger scholars to rediscover the richness and variety of Chinese culture after the ravages of Mao¡¯s ¡°cultural revolution.¡±
Yu is an Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. During his academic career, which began in 1962, Yu taught at three Ivy League universities (Princeton, Harvard, and Yale) and the University of Michigan. He also served concurrently as president of New Asia College, Hong Kong, and vice chancellor of Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1973 to 1975. He spent the bulk of his academic career at Princeton, where he taught from 1987 to 2001. In his early 40s, Yu was elected to be a lifetime member in Academia Sinica, the most distinguished academic institution in Taiwan. He was recently elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Yu¡¯s knowledge encompasses nearly the entire span of Chinese history, from early times to the present. His rich, scholarly production can be loosely clustered under three fields, each having a different specialized audience: early and medieval Chinese history; intellectual and cultural history of the later imperial period (the Song, 960-1279; Ming, 1368-1644; and Qing, 1644-1911 dynasties); and studies of intellectuals and intellectual problems in the modern period.
Yu began his scholarly career in the United States concentrating on early and medieval Chinese history. His doctoral dissertation addressed the significant transformation of the ideal of longevity into the idea of immortality, of not dying, a subject of sustained interest in Chinese culture. This study was published as a long article that remains a classic account of a critical shift in religious thinking. In his first book in English, he turned his attention to the Chinese hierarchical view of the world that framed martial and commercial expansion during the Han dynasty (203 B.C. to 220 A.D.)
From the start Yu was recognized as a leading specialist in Han and medieval history, and this recognition has continued throughout his career. Among other works, he was invited to write the Han chapter on the history of food in China; a chapter for the first volume of the prestigious, on-going series ¡°Cambridge History of China¡±; a chapter on the development of a strong concept of individualism in the Wei-Jin period (220-420 A.D.) for a symposium volume on the notion of individualism in China; and a chapter focusing on the Han period for the one-volume ¡°Cambridge History of Inner Asia.¡± In 1978 Yu was selected to be a member of the first delegation of American specialists on Chinese studies sent by the National Academy of Sciences as part of an exchange program with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The delegation comprised experts on early China, particularly the Han period, and Yu was the principal author of the delegation¡¯s report on the state of Han studies in China, published in 1981.
Yu also established himself in a second major area of Chinese studies, 17th- and 18th-century intellectual history. In 1970 he published an interpretive article in Chinese, ¡°A Consideration of the History of the Qing Thought from the Perspective of the Development of Song-Ming Confucianism.¡± This required command of the full span of Confucian thought, from the classical period prior to 231 B.C. up through the 19th century. He showed how the dominant Qing concern for what Yu began to call ¡°intellectualism¡± evolved out of an anti-intellectualism or anti-rationalism that had prevailed in the 16th century and earlier. In 1972 he published ground-breaking research on the major thinker Fang Yizhi (1611-1671). Asked in the 1990s to write a short historical introduction to the collected works of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the most influential Confucian after Confucius himself, Yu read so deeply in the source material that he ended by writing a 600-page book that fundamentally reinterpreted this towering figure.
The third academic field in which Yu has made impressive contributions is modern Chinese intellectual history. One of Yu¡¯s themes has been the relationships between intellectuals and the cultural heritage that has been attacked from many quarters at least since the beginning of the May 4th Movement in 1919, when Chinese intellectuals, motivated by resistance to the terms of the Versailles Treaty, ignited a political protest movement that launched the cultural transformation in China.
Three intellectuals born in the 1890s received special attention in books by Yu. In 1984 Yu wrote a reappraisal of Hu Shi (1891-1961), who started his career as a leader in pre-1919 cultural reform but later was strongly criticized, in part, for his scholarship and conservative views. Yu provided a compelling account of Hu¡¯s leading role as an intellectual in turbulent times. In 1991 Yu published a retrospective assessment of Qian Mu (1895-1990), one of the leading historians of the previous generation. The third, Chen Yinke (1890- 1969), was an eminent 20th-century historian of the Tang period (617-906) and the religions of China.
Yu is known not only for his scholarship but also for his sympathy for the democracy movement in mainland China and his support for young refugees who left after the suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square. Despite Yu¡¯s outspoken criticism of Chinese Communist policy, most of his scholarly works have now been published inside Communist China, including a recent 10-volume collection of his Chinese-language works (volumes 1-4 published in 2004 and volumes 5-10 published in 2006 by Guangxi Normal University.) His work is widely read and discussed throughout the Chinese-speaking world, as much on the mainland as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other nations of East Asia.
- Re: 2006 Humanityposted on 11/16/2006
more scholars like yu ying-shi who can spread chinese culture to the world and give more criticize to china are needed.:)
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