This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. Michael Szonyi: All right, colleagues and friends, thank you so much for joining us today to celebrate A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China. As I was thinking about introducing Paul, it occurred to me that a book talk needs a kind of special sort of, sorry, an autobiography needs a special kind of introduction because of course- Paul Cohen: That's why I didn't call it an autobiography. Michael Szonyi: Right, but also if you want to know about Paul's life and career, of course it's here, and if you have any questions after this, you can just ask Paul. So, it doesn't seem necessary for me to go on at much length, but I will observe the formalities and tell you a word or two about Paul. Paul retired from Wellesley College in 2000 as Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History, after a career at Wellesley of 35 years, proceeded by some peregrinations which he tells us about in the book. He has been associated with the Fairbank Center since the mid-1960s, and he is currently an associate of the Fairbank Center. That is the highest honor that we bestow on colleagues who are not faculty at Harvard. Michael Szonyi: But of course, his association with Harvard goes back much earlier. He was a student at Harvard, receiving his MA in Regional Studies of East Asia, the program that I headed much later, and then his PhD under Fairbank himself, and under Ben Schwartz. He's the author of at least a half dozen books that I could come up with off the top of my head, and I was actually was really struck that... I will tell you the titles of several of these books in a moment, but I'm really struck that I actually remember, I literally do remember reading all of them. That is to say I remember reading China and- Paul Cohen: You only remember six of them. Michael Szonyi: I quickly go to the back and see. Six is pretty good! So, I remember reading China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism as an undergraduate. I remember reading Discovering History in China as a graduate student, and Discovering History in China is a book that I literally use certainly every semester still, more than 30 years after its publication, and I know Mark and other colleagues who teach Chinese history feel the same way. It's also a book that, so I teach my graduate students how to summarize books, and I say that you should be able to summarize any work of history in a sentence or two. Discovering History of China is not actually a book that they can summarize. What they really need to do is memorize it. It's that important to understanding our field and how it emerged. Michael Szonyi: I remember reading History in Three Keys later on in my graduate career, and being inspired by that, and Speaking to History more recently still. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crises, of Crisis, sorry, which was published in 2014, I think is a lovely expression of Paul's widening ambition. It wasn't enough just to discover history in China. You had to discover history around the Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 1 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. world. There are chapters on China, on France, the Soviet Union, England, Israel Palestine, and Serbia. And then his most recent publication, and actually in my defense, because I was a little bit involved in the publication of this book, I've read this book at least four times, so that should maybe make up for me forgetting one, that may have been one or two of the other titles maybe pushed out of my mind. Michael Szonyi: It was a tremendous honor for the Fairbank Center to publish Paul's not autobiography, to publish A Path Twice Traveled. It was wonderful to read it, and learn more about the history of the Center to which all of us belong and participate, and Paul's role in it, and also Paul's contribution to the profession, to the community of scholars, and to our understanding of history more broadly. So, without further ado, please join me welcoming Paul Cohen. Paul Cohen: Thank you, Michael, for not asking me the question that you wanted to ask me, which isn't dealt with in the book and which I couldn't answer. Maybe it'll just come out. You never can tell. The writing of a career memoir is not just something that you do because it's the right time in your life to do it, although I suppose in some cases that's true. It can also be a fascinating learning experience. The seed that... Can you all hear me? Speaker 3: No. Paul Cohen: Yes? Good. The seed that grew into a full-blown memoir in my case was a conversation I had with Rao Shurong, the editor of the Chinese literary journal Dushu in October 2015 at a reception here at Harvard. She invited me to submit a piece to their journal, and I wrote her a few months later from Hong Kong suggesting a possible idea for an article. In the course of a 60-year career as a historian of China, my thinking about Chinese history and about history in general had undergone a number of shifts and turns, and since I was quite well known among Chinese historians, a number of my books having brought up in multiple Chinese language editions, I thought it might be of some interest to describe in Dushu for its readers the evolution of one non-Chinese scholar's thinking about Chinese history. Paul Cohen: Dr. Rao liked my suggestion and agreed to it. But alas, once I started working on the piece, I realized that it was a much larger undertaking than I had anticipated, and I would never be able to even come close to the length limit suggested by Dushu. My thinking was really at this point, was that rather than a short journal article, what I really needed to do was write something a good deal more substantial, probably resulting in a small book. As this change in plans was taking place, I realized that with the expanded project, I would be able in addition to tracing the development of my thinking about Chinese history, to delve into some of the more hidden aspects of my career. Still not secrets of the sort, of the autobiographical sort that you're looking for, Michael. Paul Cohen: The backstories, for example, pertaining to the sometimes thorny process, which is putting it politely, of getting a work published. Aside from enriching my own story, the material on my encounters with Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 2 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. presses over the years may even be of help to younger scholars who are just beginning to publish, and often have little sense of what the process entails. This is a pretty fragile time in the career of a scholar, and one thing he or she needs to know is that publishing houses are run by human beings, and just as human beings sometimes err in their judgments, good presses don't always make good decisions. Paul Cohen: Conveying such information, however, is not the principal aim of this memoir by a long shot. The main point of the memoir is not to give advice and comfort to the young. It's to share with readers, older ones as well as young, the sense of excitement and deep satisfaction that I have enjoyed from the process of coming to grips with history as a discipline, and more specifically, the history of a country that, although very different from my own, has turned out as my understanding of history in general has deepened, to be not quite as different as I once thought. Paul Cohen: The main sources for the memoir, my own writings and talks, published and published, and the correspondence and notes, of course, that I've kept in my files over the years, along with an occasional phone conversation with a colleague which seemed important enough to write a note on for my files. After completing a first draft of the memoir, it occurred to me that it might also be of interest to read some of the memoirs written by other historians, for which purpose I found Jeremy Popkin's book, History, Historians, and Autobiography a marvelous guide. Paul Cohen: Although in places I have touched on aspects of my personal life that clearly bore on my professional career, this is not in any sense an account of my private existence. It is first and foremost the largely public story of my intellectual evolution as a historian of China. Since a number of the books I've written have exerted considerable influence on the field of Chinese history, both in the Euro-American world and in East Asia, the memoir should be of interest to China historians and to people with a special interest in Chinese history.