Administration and staff

A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby’s work examines China's business, economic, and political development in an international context. He has written on the evolution of modern Chinese business (state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; relations across the Taiwan Strait; and China’s relations with Europe and America. His current projects include case studies of contemporary Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China and the United States.

He is Honorary Visiting Professor at Peking University, Nanjing University, Chongqing University, and Fudan University. He has held appointments also as Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. Before coming to Harvard in 1992, he was Professor of History, Director of Asian Studies, and Dean of University College at Washington University in St. Louis. At Harvard, he has served as Chair of the History Department, Director of the Asia Center, and most recently, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As Dean of Harvard's largest school from 2002 to 2006, he initiated major reforms in undergraduate education in Harvard College; enhanced Harvard's international studies at home and abroad; increased substantially financial aid in the College and in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; supported the growth of the Division (now School) of Engineering and Applied Sciences; and oversaw the construction of major new buildings in the Life Sciences, Engineering, and the Arts.  During his tenure the Faculty expanded at its most rapid rate since the 1960s.

Professor Kirby holds degrees from Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and (Dr. Phil. Honoris Causa) the Free University of Berlin. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Wanting to return to an academic environment, he became Provost of the Tokyo campus of Huron University. During that appointment he doubled the number of students on campus (increased to 600), brought in many international students (from Europe, Africa and Asia), and increased the percentage of faculty members holding the PhD degree (total faculty of 40). It was a successful, fun experience.  In 1997 he returned to the US and became an associate in research at the Fairbank Center. He worked at the Harvard-Yenching Institute beginning in 2000, and then transferred to the Fairbank Center.

Among his publications are Affective Expressions in Japanese (1982), a book about conversational Japanese; The Red Spears by Dai Xuanzhi (1985), a translated account of an important secret society in modern China, with an introduction by Elizabeth Perry; The Modernization of Manchuria: An Annotated Bibliography (1994), which introduced many Chinese and Japanese language academic works to English-speaking scholars; and Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization and Manchuria (2002). This last book received many favorable reviews and was also profiled in Lishi yanjiu (no 4, 2005).

In celebration of the Fairbank Center’s fiftieth anniversary, he wrote The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, a fifty year history, 1955-2005, which was published in December 2005 coinciding with the start of a major conference to mark the anniversary.