Yuri
Pines
Professor, the Department of Asian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Received the Polonsky Travel Grant in 1994
In 1993/1994, immediately after finishing my MA studies, I went for a year of study at Nankai University, Tianjin, China, supported by the exchange fellowship with the People’s Republic of China and by the very generous Polonsky Foundation Travel Grant. That year became the single most significant year in my academic career and perhaps in my life in general. It exposed me all of a sudden to the Chinese academic world, of which we in Israel knew next to nothing about back then. I discovered not just plenty of important studies on the topic of my research, but, more significantly, a plethora of new scholarly approaches, new angles of discussion of China’s past, and the entirely new problematic, which distinguished markedly Chinese research from Western approaches to Chinese history. In particular, topics such as early Chinese political thought and traditional Chinese political culture were completely marginal in Western academy, but stood at the core of the research of my Nankai teachers and future colleagues. Almost instantly upon arrival I realized how important it would be to understand Chinese approaches and re-introduce them to Western colleagues.
In a nutshell this may be considered the story of my academic career ever since. While my scholarly methodology remains decisively Western, the topics of my research, i.e. political thought and political culture of early and traditional China, were shaped during the first year at Nankai and remain the hallmark of my scholarly pursue ever since. Gradually, I succeeded to establish myself as one of the leading scholars in the field worldwide. I have published extensively on these and related topics, having penned 5 books (with more to come soon), edited two more, and co-edited several other books and journal issues, in addition to publishing over 60 scholarly articles. My debt to Nankai teachers is duly recognized in the acknowledgement section of each of my major publications. My 2009 book, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press) was granted the 2010 Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines; it had been translated into French and Chinese and published by two prestigious publishers (Paris: Belles Lettres and Shanghai Guji chubanshe, both 2013). My recent book (The Everlasting Empire: Traditional Chinese Political Culture and Its Enduring Legacy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012]) had been strongly endorsed by reviewers, and I expect that it will be translated into Chinese and other languages soon.
As is evident from the above, the 1993/1994 Nankai stay has contributed decisively to my career. In 1998, I had successfully finished the PhD dissertation I began at Nankai; and during that year I began my employment at the Department of East Asian Studies of the Hebrew University. I climbed the ladder from a young teacher to professor; for several years I chaired my home department, during which period it was nominated the university’s most outstanding unit (2011). As a department chair and academic secretary of the Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies (2006-2012), I had the privilege of collaborating with Dr. Leonard Polonsky on a series of new projects, including his all-important support of our Asian Languages Library, launching a summer course in Chinese for the undergraduates, and promoting other initiatives, such as establishing the alumni organization of the graduates of our department. These projects, which allow us to come closer toward realizing our goal of becoming one of the leading Sinology centers worldwide, are hugely significant, and so is the ongoing support of travel through the Polonsky Foundation for new generations of exchange students. As my personal experience demonstrates, this is the best long-term investment in nurturing new generations of Israeli Sinologists.
It is appropriate now to express once again my deep gratitude to Dr. Polonsky and to the Polonsky Foundation for the travel grant which had helped tremendously to foster my personal career and for their ongoing support of our field.