Frederic Wakeman
| Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 12, 1937 Kansas City, Kansas |
| Died | September 14, 2006 (aged 68) Lake Oswego, Oregon |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | East Asia |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater | Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Joseph Levenson |
| Notable students | Mark Elliott, Joseph Esherick, Linda Grove, Joanna Handlin Smith, Madeleine Zelin, Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Wen-hsin Yeh, Melissa Macauley, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Ann Waltner, Christopher A. Reed, Orville Schell |
Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. (Chinese: 魏斐德; pinyin: Wèi Fěidé; December 12, 1937 – September 14, 2006) was a prominent American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along," adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years."
Wakeman was born in Kansas City, Kansas. His father was the novelist Frederic E. Wakeman, Sr. (publishing as "Frederic Wakeman"), who often moved the family to live abroad in places like Bermuda, France, and Cuba. In the 1940s and 1950s, the family lived at 433 Isle of Palms in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He graduated from Harvard University in 1959, where he majored in European history and literature. After Harvard, he went on to earn master's degrees from the University of Cambridge and at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris. While studying at the Institut d'études politiques, he switched to Chinese studies. In 1962 he published a novel, Seventeen Royal Palms Drive, under the name "Evans Wakeman." Wakeman received his Ph.D. in Far Eastern history at University of California, Berkeley in 1965, under the supervision of Professor Joseph Levenson. That year he began teaching at Berkeley, where he remained his entire career and retired as the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Asian Studies. Wakeman served as the director of "Institute of East Asian Studies" at Berkeley from 1990 to 2001. Upon his retirement from Berkeley in May 2006, he received the "Berkeley Citation", the highest honor given at the university.
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