Fairbank Center Staff

William C. Kirby
Director
William C. Kirby is the Geisinger Professor of History, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Chairman of the Harvard China Fund, and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby’s work examines China's economic and political development in an international context. He has written on China's relations with Europe; the evolution of modern Chinese business; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; U.S.-China relations; and relations across the Taiwan Strait. He holds appointments as Visiting Professor at Peking University, Nanjing University, and the Free University of Berlin. He is presently also Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School. 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. Before coming to Harvard in 1992, he was Professor of History, Director of Asian Studies, and Dean of University College at Washington University. 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.

Martin Whyte
Acting Director, 2007–2008

Martin Whyte joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology at Harvard in fall 2000, after previously teaching at the University of Michigan and George Washington University. "In a sense it is a homecoming for me, since I did my graduate work at Harvard in the 1960s, with many hours logged in William James Hall (and in Coolidge Hall as well)." To learn more about Professor Whyte's personal and academic history, please consult his Personal Background Statement. For more details on his scholarly publications and other activities, please consult his Curriculum Vitae.

Professor Whyte's primary research and teaching specialties are comparative sociology, sociology of the family, sociology of development, the sociological study of contemporary China, and the study of post-communist transitions. His most recent writings reflect these divergent interests: an edited volume entitled Marriage in America: A Communitarian Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and an edited collection of papers drawing on a survey project that focused on relations between aging parents and their grown children in urban Chinese families, entitled China's Revolutions and Inter-Generational Relations (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2003). One newer research project involves surveys on Chinese popular perceptions of inequality trends and views about distributive justice issues. A pilot survey for this project was successfully conducted in Beijing in December 2000. A national survey focusing on inequality and distributive justice issues was completed in the summer of 2004.

Ronald Suleski
Assistant Director             

Ronald Suleski received his PhD in modern Chinese history from the University of Michigan. He taught at the University of Texas at Arlington until 1980. That year he received a fellowship from the Japan Foundation and moved to Tokyo for research. At the end of the year, he decided to stay longer, and ended up living in Japan until 1997. He tried the world of business, where he worked as managing director or president for three American and British publishers of technical, medical, and legal journals.

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.

Wen-Hao Tien
Programs Officer

Linda Kluz
Coordinator of the Director's Office

Melanie Wang
Web/Publications Designer

Fairbank Center Library

Nancy Hearst
Librarian

Ying-Ming Lee
Library Assistant
Mrs. Lee has been working at the Fairbank Center Library since 1998. From 1995 to 1998 she worked at the Harvard-Yenching Library. She has a BA in history from the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan and took several courses at the University of Hawaii college system while she and her husband lived in Hawaii in 1980s.