Samuel C. Chu Memorial Lecture Series in East Asian Studies
Samuel C. Chu (1929-2013) was a distinguished historian of modern China, educator, and academic leader whose career helped establish East Asian studies as a major field at The Ohio State University. Born in Shanghai and educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University, Chu joined the Ohio State faculty in 1969 after teaching at Bucknell University and the University of Pittsburgh, and later became the founding director of the university’s East Asian Studies Center. Widely respected for his scholarship, he authored Reformer in Modern China: Chang Chien and co-edited influential volumes on Li Hung-chang and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, while also serving as president of the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs. Remembered by colleagues and students for his intellectual leadership and dedication to teaching, Chu retired in 1995 as Professor Emeritus. The Samuel C. Chu Lecture in East Asian Studies, established through the generosity of his wife, Lucy Chu, and their family, honors his enduring legacy as a scholar, mentor, and builder of international understanding.
Previous Lectures
2025
“The Transformation of China: Origins of Our Time”
Odd Arne Westad, Yale University
2024
“Bone Collectors: Remembering the Socialist Dead on a Postsocialist Land and Water”
Ling Zhang, University of Cambridge
2023
“The Evolving History of the Qing Empire: The New Nineteenth Century”
Pamela Kyle Crossley, Dartmouth College
2019
“South Korean Millennials’ Military Service and Neoliberal Calculations”
Seung-kyung Kim, Indiana University
2018
“The (Non) Economic Thinking of Japan’s Decision Makers for World War II, 1931-1945”
Richard Smethurst, University of Pittsburgh
2017
“The Bombers and the Bombed: The End of World War II as Historians See It”
Carol Gluck, Columbia University
2016
“U.S. China Policy: Challenges for the Next Administration”
Andrew Nathan, Columbia University
2015
“The Travel of Anxieties: Rethinking the impact of Western medicine on Japanese conceptions of the body”
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University
2014
“Late Imperial China from the Bottom Up: What the Historical Anthropology of a Taiwan Community can Tell us about China Then and Now”
Myron L. Cohen, Columbia University