Merle Goldman
| Merle Goldman | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 12, 1931 |
| Other names | Chinese: 戈德曼; pinyin: Ge Démàn) |
| Alma mater |
Harvard University Radcliffe College Sarah Lawrence College |
| Known for | Histories of Chinese intellectuals and democracy |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions |
Boston University Wellesley College |
| Academic advisors | Benjamin I. Schwartz, John King Fairbank |
Merle Goldman (born March 12, 1931) is an American historian of modern China. She is Professor Emerita of History, Boston University, especially known for a series of studies on the role of intellectuals under the rule of Mao Zedong and on the possibilities for democracy and political rights in present-day China.
Goldman graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1953, then took a master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1957. She then went on for a Ph.D. at Harvard University, which she received in 1964 in History and Far Eastern Languages, studying with Benjamin I. Schwartz and John King Fairbank. Fairbank, she later recalled, supported her in her own interests, which were quite different from his. |She was an instructor at Wellesley College during 1963-1964, then taught in the History Department of Boston University from 1972 until her retirement in 2001. During those years she was Research Associate of the East Asian Research Center, which became the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, at Harvard University, becoming a member of the Executive Committee in 1967 and serving to the present.
Among her honors, grants and memberships are Radcliffe Graduate Medal for Distinguished Achievement, June 1981; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1987-1988;American Council of Learned Societies; the Social Science Research Council; Wang Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Chinese Studies, 1984-85. She was a member of the United States delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights (1993–94); Editorial Board, China Quarterly.
She is married to the Wellesley College economist, Marshall Goldman. They have four children.
Goldman, as historian Perry Link observes, began by studying the adversarial relations between writers and the Party leadership, both of whom assumed that "literature, morality, and politics are closely intertwined -- indeed little more than different aspects of essentially the same thing." Goldman's doctoral dissertation, which became her first book, Literary Dissent in Communist China, dealt with the formative period when the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong was centered at Yan'an in the 1940s. Party policy toward intellectuals was governed by Mao's "Talks At the Yan'an Forum", which required intellectuals to "serve the people" rather than pursue "art for art's sake." The book describes the emergence of Zhou Yang as the Party bureaucrat dealing with culture and intellectual life. Zhou orchestrated the campaigns that set up control of intellectuals. These included Ding Ling, a woman writer who was eventually forgiven for her frank descriptions of the Party's mistreatment of women, and Wang Shiwei, who was accused of plotting the overthrow the Party because it did not allow free expression and who was eventually executed. Goldman's book was widely praised and widely cited, but some also pointed out that it made "little acknowledgment" of the "often strong differences among writers" and that "the complete focus was on the negative impact of party's attempts to control literature." "All that mattered," said one critic, "was that writers were seeking freedom and it was being denied."
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