Philip Alden Kuhn
Philip Alden Kuhn was born to a family of writers in 1933 in London. His mother wrote for the New Yorker and Current History; his father was London bureau chief for the New York Times. Together, they authored the book Borderlands, describing the Inner Asian frontiers of the country whose history Philip would make his life’s work.
Philip was a proud graduate of Harvard College, A.B. 1954. After a year in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies, he served in the Army, where he studied Chinese at its Monterey language school. He earned an M.A. from Georgetown before returning to Harvard, where he studied under John King Fairbank and Benjamin Schwartz. Graduate student colleagues recall his rare intelligence, his good fellowship, and the powerful bat he wielded at baseball games.
Philip taught first at the University of Chicago before joining Harvard’s faculty in 1978. He was, his former student Prasenjit Duara recalls, “a historian’s historian. Sitting at a vast table, with gazetteers and documents spread out before him, he approached these materials like a master craftsman, his sleeves rolled up and a pencil lodged behind his ear.” Through artful, deeply researched storytelling, he reshaped approaches to modern China for historians everywhere.