Willard J. Peterson, Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, specializes in Chinese intellectual history of the Ming-Qing period and in early Chinese thought. He received an M.A. in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University (1964) and a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern languages from Harvard University (1970), He is the author of several studies on the seventeenth century, including Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change (Yale University Press, 1979), and on the early period, including "Making Connections: The Commentary on the Attached Verbalizations in the Book of Change, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42 (1982). He authored chapters on "Confucian Learning in Late Ming" and "Learning from Heaven" in volume 8 of the Cambridge History of China (1998), and is the editor of volume 9, The Ch'ing Dynasty to 1800 (2002). He is also a contributor and co-editor of The Power of Culture: Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1994) and of Ways with Words: Writing about Reading Texts from Early China (University of California Press, 2000).

Education

Ph.D., Harvard, 1970