Edwin Oldfather Reischauer was an American diplomat, educator, and professor at Harvard University. Born in Tokyo to American educational missionaries, he became a leading scholar of the history and culture of Japan and East Asia. Together with George M. McCune, a scholar of Korea, in 1939 he developed the McCune–Reischauer romanization of the Korean language.
East Asian studies is a distinct multidisciplinary field of scholarly enquiry and education that promotes a broad humanistic understanding of East Asia past and present. The field includes the study of the region's culture, written language, history and political institutions. East Asian studies is located within the broader field of Asian studies and is also interdisciplinary in character, incorporating elements of the social sciences and humanities, among others. The field encourages scholars from diverse disciplines to exchanges ideas on scholarship as it relates to the East Asian experience and the experience of East Asia in the world. In addition, the field encourages scholars to educate others to have a deeper understanding of and appreciation and respect for, all that is East Asia and, therefore, to promote peaceful human integration worldwide.
Fred McGraw Donner is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.
Albert Morton Craig was an American academic, historian, author and professor emeritus in the Department of History at Harvard University.
Anthony Christopher Yu was an American literary theorist, sinologist, and theologian. He was a scholar of literature and religion, both East Asian and Western; and was the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Chicago Divinity School; as well as a member of the Departments of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and English Language and Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Yu has published widely in the fields of religion and comparative literature and is perhaps best known for his four-volume translation of one of China's Four Great Classical Novels Journey to the West into English.
Sachiko Murata is Japanese scholar of comparative philosophy and mysticism and a professor of religion and Asian studies at Stony Brook University.
William Theodore de Bary was an American Sinologist and scholar of East Asian philosophy who was a professor and administrator at Columbia University for nearly 70 years.
Akira Iriye is a Japanese-born American historian and orientalist. He is a historian of diplomatic history, international, and transnational history. He taught at University of Chicago and Harvard University until his retirement in 2005.
Edward Kamens is Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Literature at Yale University, where he has taught since 1986. His dissertation focused on the Buddhist setsuwa collection Sanbōe, and more recently he has written on allusive or intertextual language in premodern literature, particularly utamakura in waka. He was Master of Saybrook College and is now a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. Professor Kamens and his wife, art history professor and former Saybrook College Master and current Yale College Dean Mary Miller, are rumored to appear as extras in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, part of which was filmed at Yale.
Christian Konrad Wedemeyer is an American scholar and political and social activist.
Richard Foltz is a Canadian scholar of American origin. He is a specialist in the history of Iranian civilization—what is sometimes referred to as "Greater Iran". He has also been active in the areas of environmental ethics and animal rights.
Helen Hardacre is an American Japanologist. She is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization, Harvard University.
Caleb Powell Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago. His primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey is an American art historian and sinologist specializing in cultural and gender issues during the Chinese Song Dynasty. Ebrey obtained her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1968 and her Masters and PhD from Columbia University in 1970 and 1975, respectively. Upon receiving her PhD, Ebrey was hired as visiting assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She became an associate professor in 1982 and a full professor three years later. Subsequently, in 1997, she accepted a Professor of History position at the University of Washington, from which she retired in July 2020. She's now Professor Emerita of History at that institution.
Samuel Perry is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University. Having grown up on the East Side of Providence, RI, and attended Moses Brown and Classical High School, he went on to study at Brown University and the University of Chicago. Now a specialist on Japanese and Korean history, culture and literature, he is the author of several books on leftist cultures of activism around the globe, including Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde. He is also the translator of Kang Kyŏng-ae 강경애's novel From Wŏnso Pond as well as a collection of stories Five Faces of Feminism by Ineko Sata 佐多稲子, aided by a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.
Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, also known as T.H. Tsien, was a Chinese-American bibliographer, librarian, and sinologist who served as a professor of Chinese literature and library science at the University of Chicago, and was also curator of its East Asian Library from 1949 to 1978. He is known for studies of the history of the Chinese book, Chinese bibliography, paleography, and science and technology, especially the history of paper and printing in China, notably Paper and Printing, Volume 5 Pt 1 of British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. He is also known for risking his life to smuggle tens of thousands of rare books outside of Japanese-occupied China during World War II.
Lenore A. Grenoble is an American linguist specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. She is currently the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor and chair at University of Chicago.
Wang Youqin is a scholar specializing in East Asian studies and is currently a professor at the University of Chicago. Professor Wang is notable for her research on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, especially the Red August of Beijing. She is known for her research on the cultural revolution and compilation of lists of victims of the Cultural Revolution and their stories.
James E. Ketelaar is an American scholar and historian specializing in the religious, philosophical, and intellectual history of Japan. He is professor emeritus in the Department of History, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1996.
