Earl H. Pritchard

Earl H. Pritchard (June 5, 1907 – May 9, 1995) was an American scholar of China and one of the founders of the Association for Asian Studies and served as its president.

Pritchard was born on June 5, 1907, in

After completing his doctoral dissertation, Pritchard taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1934 until transferring to Washington State in 1935, where he stayed until 1937. He studied Chinese at Columbia University and the University of Michigan between 1937 and 1939, but he later regretted that his Chinese did not reach the level of proficiency he felt any serious student of China should be.

Pritchard taught at

He cited the major achievements of his career as the foundation of what was to become the Association for Asian Studies and the Journal of Asian Studies, and secondly the growth of oriental studies at the University of Arizona. He cited as his third most important achievement the publication of Anglo-Chinese Relations During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (a compacted version of his M.A. thesis), The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations 1750–1800 (based in part on his doctoral thesis, 1936), sections written for The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (1961), the coauthoring of Volume 4 of the UNESCO History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development.

He died on May 9, 1995, in Tucson at the age of 87.

References

• Pritchard, Phil (August 1995). "Obituary: Earl H. Pritchard (1907–1995)".
  doi:10.1017/s0021911800129134
  .