Gideon
Shelach
Professor, Department of Asian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Received the Polonsky Travel Grant in 1994
I received the “Polonsky Travel Award” in 1994, after graduating from the Department of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University, while I was studying towards a doctoral degree in Chinese Archaeology at the University of Pittsburgh. This support helped me travel to China, where I enrolled at Peking University but mostly conducted archaeological field work in the Chifeng region (northeast China). I was fortunate enough to be among the first non-Chinese scholars who were permitted to conduct their own archaeological field work in China. After completing my research I returned to the USA, where I finished my Ph.D., and soon after that I received a lecturer position at the Department of East Asian Studies of the Hebrew University, where I am currently a professor of Chinese Studies.
The research I conducted in China with the generous support of the Polonsky foundation was published in my first book, titled Leadership Strategies, Economic Activity, and Interregional Interaction: Social Complexity in Northeast China. I continued working in the same region, in cooperation with Chinese and American archaeologists, during the following ten years. Our joint research resulted in two additional books and numerous other publications. More recently I started a new project, this time a cooperation between the Hebrew University and Jilin University in China. This new archaeological project, conducted in the Fuxin area of Liaoning province, addresses the beginning of agriculture and sedentary ways of life in northern China. The project is supported by the National Geographic Society and by the Israel Science Foundation, and during the last two years I was able to bring 12 students from the Hebrew University to China, where they participated in field work, interacted with Chinese students and professors, and gained first-hand knowledge of life in rural China.
During the years I have served in a number of positions at the Hebrew University. I was the Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, the first director of the Freiberg Center for East Asian Studies, and the Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. I have published six books (one of them translated into
Chinese and recently published in China), one edited book, and more than 40 papers in leading academic journals