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Introduction of Major Institutions
The Harvard-Yenching Institute:
The Past and the Present

The HarvardYenching Institutewas founded in1928 through thegenerosity of theestate of Charles M.
Hall. As an independent foundation,
since 1928, theHarvard-Yenching
Institute has been
dedicated to advancing higher education in Asia in the humanities and social sciences, with special attention to the study of Chinese culture. Located on the campus ofHarvard University, the Institute currently has partnerships with more thanﬁfty universities and research institutions in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Thailand. The Institute supports doctoral scholarships, visiting fellowships, academic publications, advanced
training programs as well as conferences and other scholarly initiatives inAsia, at Harvard University, and elsewhere. All these programs and activities
are intended to promote higher education and research in Asian studies aswell as other topics in the humanities and social sciences.
The Institute has always been housed on the campus of Harvard University.
A few decades ago, it was located at Boylston Hall at Harvard Yard, next tothe Widener Library. Currently, the Institute has two oﬃces: the ProgramOﬃce is located in Vanserg Hall, next to Harvard Divinity School, and theDirector’s Oﬃce is located at 2 Divinity Avenue, the same building where theHarvard-Yenching Library is located.
In the years since 1928, the Harvard-Yenching Institute has become oneof the leading institutions in the world and the most inﬂuential institute in theUnited States concerned with the humanities and social sciences with anemphasis on cultural studies of China and East Asia. The original purpose of

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founding the Institute is to help establish a program of Far Eastern Studies atHarvard as well as to assist the development of the ﬁeld of Chinese studies at
Yenching University in Beijing. As the program has developed in the past 80years, the Institute has been making great eﬀorts in promoting scholarly
communication among Asian scholars and between Asian scholars and theircounterparts in other regions of the world. Although it has been focused onscholarship related to East Asia with a focus on China, the Harvard-Yenching
Institute has played an active role in fostering the entire range of AsianStudies at Harvard.
By the late 1960s, the ﬁeld of Asian Studies was quite well establishedand widely recognized at Harvard while Asian Studies program was springing
up at universities throughout the United States. The HYI has ﬂourished over
all these years since its formation because of the continuing and untiring
eﬀorts of many brilliant scholars.
Since 1954, the core program of the Harvard-Yenching Institute has been
its visiting scholars program. It oﬀers full fellowship for faculty in top East
Asian University to come to the Harvard-Yenching Institute for a one-year
research stay. From then up to the early 1980s, the Harvard-Yenching
Institute had regularly recruited East Asian faculty from Japan, Korea,
Vietnam and Taiwan to come the Institute as visiting scholars. Through thisprogram, young scholars (in the early years of the program this meant individuals up to the age of 40) who already had teaching positions would cometo the HYI for one or two years with a full scholarship that consisted ofround trip airfare, health insurance and a monthly stipend. Upon invited andrequested, the partner universities and research institutions in each of thesecountries nominate younger faculty as candidates for the Visiting Scholars
Program. This practice has been continued throughout the present withChinese top universities and research institutions to join the program in theearly 1980s. Currently, 19 universities/research institutions in China hadestablished partnership with the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and as thepartner universities and research institutions in other regions and countries in
East Asia and Southeast Asia, they are eligible to nominate candidates to theVisiting Scholars program on annual basis.
A much smaller and relatively new program is the Visiting Fellows
Program. This program was conceived by the former Director Patrick Hanan
as a means of addressing what he described, in a report to the December
1987 Board of Trustees meeting, as “the problem of the brain drain fromChina” and a resultant “new Chinese government policy under which thenumber of people sent abroad for PhDs would be greatly reduced.” In
response to these worrisome developments, Professor Hanan, according to theminutes of the meeting, “suggested a new approach – bringing the best young

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candidates enrolled in Chinese universities’ own PhD programs here for ayear or two of training and dissertation research.” This seems to be a supplementary approach to the existing Visiting Scholars program which had a hardtime to get nominations from the Chinese partner universities. As theprogram evolved, faculty in the Asian Universities are required to have a PhDto land in a teaching position, whereas more and more graduate students in aPh.D. program search for an opportunity as such. The Institute graduallystarted to accept applicants who are doctoral students/part-time instructor/teaching assistants as well as full-time graduate students and junior faculty
members who are at the same time working toward a Ph.D. At the present, all
the visiting fellows in residence are doctoral students who are working intheir dissertation research and writing. Over the ensuing decades since thelate 1980s, the program has oﬀered many outstanding Asian doctoral students
the great opportunity to study at the Institute, some of whom continue toremain in close touch as active and supportive HYI alumni.
The Institute has also supported graduate students from Asia in doctoral
program at Harvard and other top-notch universities. This program has beenterminated about 10 years ago, to be replaced by a joint doctoral program
between the Harvard-Yenching Institute and National University ofSingapore.
Since Professor Elizabeth Perry took over the directorship in 2008, theHarvard-Yenching Institute has started a series of advanced training programat Harvard and in Asian partner universities with ﬁeld development as its
focus and purpose. The Advanced Training Program is a recent initiative of
the Harvard-Yenching Institute, in which a small group of promising young
Asian scholars in particular ﬁelds of the humanities and social sciences areselected and brought together either at Harvard or in Asia. The Training
Programs held in Cambridge involve close work with eminent scholars atHarvard and other major universities in the United States. The Training
Program visiting scholars and fellows join academic activities organized by
the academic community at large. The program aims to increase scholars’
knowledge of new work in their ﬁeld and to foster collaborative work as acommunity.
The Harvard-Yenching Institute also co-sponsors training programs heldin Asia. The programs seek to bring together students and scholars from
diﬀerent disciplines across Asia and beyond to create a new network conducive to collaborative research. As part of the programs, HYI and its
co-sponsoring institutions organize a series of lectures (including several byHarvard faculty). Following the conclusion of each training program, a small
number of outstanding trainees may be invited to come to the Institute for a
one-year research stay during the next academic year.

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There have been a number of new program and initiatives that are
introduced in response to the new environment and dynamics of Asian
academia and the landscape of Asian Studies in the United State.
The new requirement that aim at further interaction and collaboration
between the Harvard-Yenching Institute visiting scholars and fellows andfaulty and students at Harvard and other universities and research institutionsof the United States.
As a key institution on Asian Studies with an emphasis on China andChinese, the Institute has been the most important sponsor for the HarvardYenching Library that carries the biggest collection on East Asian Studies
outside Asia. Although the Harvard Yenching Library was administratively
separated from the Institute and became part of the University Librarysystem, the Library maintains a close relationship with the Institute. TheInstitute continues providing ﬁnancial support to the Library and provides thebest services ever for the visiting scholars and fellows during their researchstay.
In addition, the Harvard-Yenching Institute has also sponsored a numberof publication projects. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies was founded in
1936, and has without interruption since then pursued its mission to disseminate original, outstanding research and book reviews on the humanities inAsia, focusing at present on the areas of China, Japan, Korea, and Inner Asia.
As scholarship has evolved, so has this Journal, but always while holding
constant the commitment to serve authors and readers alike through thecareful selection and editing of its contents. The other publication project
overseen by the Asia Center Publications Program is the Harvard-Yenching
Institute monograph series that consists of over 60 titles, and have publishedmany outstanding works by junior scholars as well as well-establishedresearchers. In China, The Institute sponsors 2 major publication projects; oneis the HYI-Sanlian Academic Series that has published over 100 titles since
the mid-1990s. This series has become the brand name for the publication of
newly minted Ph.D. and junior scholars in the humanities and social science,and has contributed tremendously to a new generation of leading scholars inthe ﬁeld. The other is China Scholarship organized by Liu Dong of Tsinghua
University in Beijing, China. The Harvard-Yenching Institute has recentlystarted a new publication project with National Taiwan University Press topublish academic works in Chinese by scholars in wide Chinese speakingregions.
In the past 90 years since its founding year, the Harvard-Yenching Institutehas been continuing its mission to support higher education and research in
Asia with a focus on China. In order to continue this tradition, the Institutehas always been well focused on the three aspects of its mission: building a

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scholarly community through its visiting scholars and fellows and graduate
students program, providing scholarly resources for its scholarly community
through its support to the Harvard Yenching Library, and of course helping
scholars to turn their research into inﬂuential end result, which are publications.