Arthur Waldron

Arthur Waldron
Photograph of Professor Waldron taken by Richard Greenly in 2014
Born	Arthur Nelson Waldron (1948-12-13) 13 December 1948 (age 68) Boston, United States
Residence	Gladwyne, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Fields	Chinese history, comparative nationalism, integrative history, military history, international relations, Russian history
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania Naval War College Brown Princeton
Alma mater	Harvard
Doctoral advisor	Philip A. Kuhn, Joseph F. Fletcher Jr.
Other academic advisors	Yingshih Yü, Frederick Mote, Richard Pipes
Notable students	Luo Zhitian (Peking University)
Known for	The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth
Spouse	Xiaowei Yu (1988-present)

Arthur Waldron (born December 13, 1948) is an American historian. Since 1997 he has been the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He works chiefly on Asia, China in particular, often with a focus on the origins and development of nationalism, and the study of war and violence in general. He has published numerous scholarly papers and reviews, and written, edited, or contributed to more than twenty books, including two in Chinese only.

Waldron was born in Boston on December 13, 1948. Waldron studied at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut and Winchester College in England. He attended Harvard College from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1971, receiving the Sophia Freund Prize, given to the student ranked academically highest in his class. In 1981 he received a Ph.D. in history, also from Harvard.

Waldron is a founder and vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington DC. He is a former director of Asian studies with the American Enterprise Institute, a director of the American Association of Chinese Studies, a member of the Board of the Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to arriving at the University of Pennsylvania, Waldron taught at, the U.S. Naval War College, and Princeton University, and as adjunct professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University. In 2003-2004 he was Visiting Professor of History,at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Waldron has lived and studied in China, Japan, Taiwan, France, England, and the former Soviet Union, where he earned a certificate in Russian language proficiency. He occasionally consults for the U.S. government, and was a founding member of the Congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (2000-) as well as one of twelve outside experts on the top-secret Tilelli Commission (2000-2001) which evaluated the CIA’s China operations. He has represented the United States in “track two” meetings with Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan and Russia.