In Memoriam: Paul A. Cohen

Paul A. Cohen, Edith Stix Wasserman Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and professor emeritus of history, died on Sept. 15, 2025. A scholar of tremendous talent and creativity, Paul taught at Wellesley for 35 years—while producing elite scholarship that played a major role in redefining the field of modern Chinese history. He leaves behind a towering legacy and a well-deserved reputation for congeniality and intellectual generosity.

Born in 1934 in Great Neck, N.Y., Paul attended the University of Chicago before earning his Ph.D. at Harvard University. With his 1965 appointment to the faculty at Wellesley, Paul became a leading figure for East Asian and Chinese studies throughout greater Boston. A longtime associate in research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Paul is fondly remembered as a friend, mentor, and major contributor to the center’s intellectual life. (I urge readers to look at “In Memoriam: Paul A. Cohen (1934–2025)”.) But Paul’s scholarly reputation was international, so much so that my colleagues and I first learned of his passing through Chinese online media, which was quick to cover the accomplishments of Professor Ke Wen, as he is also known.

Those accomplishments helped transform the global field of Chinese history. Paul’s best-known book is Discovering History in China (Columbia, 1984), which was reissued several times and translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. In this book, Paul carefully critiqued the ways that American-trained historians, including himself, approached the Chinese past: as a traditional culture unable to modernize, as a society shaped primarily by the challenge of Euro-American imperialism rather than its own profound, endogenous processes of change. By identifying and encouraging an emerging trend of China-centered approaches to understanding modern China’s vast challenges and upheavals, this book inspired younger scholars around the globe to research and teach in ways less fettered by Eurocentric assumptions and paradigms.

A prolific writer, Paul produced numerous single-authored and co-edited books. One of my (and many others’) favorites is History in Three Keys (Columbia, 1997), a winner of the prestigious John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association. The book analyzes North China’s well-known Boxer Uprising from three angles: as historical “event” (Paul provides a scholarly narrative of the Boxers, 1895–1901), as “experience,” and as “myth.” In the section on “experience,” Paul sought, with great sympathy and care, to puzzle out the diverse motivations of the often-nameless Boxers. The “myth” section explores later manipulations of the movement’s memory for political agendas that sought to portray the Boxers as either superstitious villains or heroic anti-imperialist nationalists. Deeply thoughtful and sophisticated, the book is nonetheless elegant and clear as it “illuminate[s] the tension between the history that people make, which is in some sense fixed, and the histories that people write and use, which seem forever changing,” as the director of the Fairbank Center wrote in a memorial to Paul.

In 2000, after Paul’s retirement from Wellesley, I accepted the position of historian of China at Wellesley for several reasons, but one of them was because Paul Cohen had taught here. I arrived to find a vibrant environment for the teaching of East Asian languages, politics, history, and art—a set of programs built and nurtured by Paul and his colleagues. I arrived with my slate of courses that emphasized a China-centered approach to understanding the major changes of the last three centuries. In short, I stepped, gratefully, into a set of programs at Wellesley College and a career of teaching Chinese history that bore the unmistakable imprints of Paul Cohen.