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Joseph Fletcher (historian)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

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Fletcher graduated from Harvard University in 1957.[1] 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.[1]

Fletcher died on June 14, 1984, at the age of 49. He died from complications due to cancer.[2]

Personal life

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Fletcher was the son of Joseph Fletcher, an ethicist. Fletcher had two children.[2]

His son is Edward Fletcher, who played Sixth Officer James Paul Moody in Titanic (1997 film).

Notable works

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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

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  1. ^ a b "Joseph Fletcher". Harvard University Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Archived from the original on 4 November 2021.
  2. ^ a b "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.
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