Joseph F. Fletcher, Jr., usually referred to as Joseph Fletcher (1934–1984), was an American historian of China and Central Asia and a professor in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department of Harvard University. His main areas of research included interaction between the Islamic and Chinese worlds, Manchu and Mongol studies.
Biography
Fletcher graduated from Harvard University in 1957. He received his PhD from Harvard's Department of Far Eastern Languages in 1965, and became an assistant professor within the department a year later. In 1972, he was appointed professor of Chinese and Central Asian History.
Fletcher died on June 14, 1984, at the age of 49. He died from complications due to cancer.
Personal life
Fletcher was the son of Joseph Fletcher, an ethicist. Fletcher had two children.
His son is Edward Fletcher, who played Sixth Officer James Paul Moody in Titanic (1997 film).
Notable works
Joseph Fletcher contributed several chapters ("Ch'ing Inner Asia, c. 1800", and others) to vol. 10 of The Cambridge History of China:
- Fletcher, Joseph F. (1978), "Ch'ing Inner Asia", in Twitchett, Denis Crispin; Fairbank, John King (eds.), The Cambridge history of China, Volume 10, Part 1, Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–106, ISBN 0-521-21447-5
Joseph Fletcher's posthumously published work, The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China (Variorum, 1995), remains one of the main English-languages sources on the introduction of Sufism into China, and is extensively cited by practically all books in English on Islam in China published since then.
References
- ^ "Joseph Fletcher". Harvard University Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Archived from the original on 4 November 2021.
- ^ "Joseph F. Fletcher Jr. Dies; Historian of Asia at Harvard". The New York Times. 1984-06-16. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 15 May 2022. Retrieved 2022-05-15.
External links
- The Joseph Fletcher Memorial Lecture: biography and bibliography.
- Joseph Fletcher Bibliography
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- American sinologists
- American historians of Islam
- Harvard University faculty
- 1934 births
- 1984 deaths
- 20th-century American historians
- American male non-fiction writers
- Mongolists
- Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
- Historians of Central Asia
- 20th-century American male writers
- American historian stubs
- Islamic scholar stubs