Background
Don J. Wyatt was born on April 12, 1953, in Alton, Illinois, United States to the family of Robert Lee Wyatt and Sarah Cordelia Foster.
Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin, United States
Don J. Wyatt graduated from Beloit College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Don J. Wyatt earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Harvard University in 1978 and 1984 respectively.
(The I Ching, or Book of Changes, has been one of the two ...)
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, has been one of the two or three most influential books in the Chinese canon. It has been used by people on all levels of society, both as a method of divination and as a source of essential ideas about the nature of heaven, earth, and humankind. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sung dynasty literati turned to it for guidance in their fundamental reworking of the classical traditions. This book explores how four leading thinkers - Su Shih, Shao Yung, Ch'eng I, and Chu Hsi - applied the I Ching to these projects. These four men used the Book of Changes in strikingly different ways. Yet each claimed to find in it a sure foundation for human values. Their work established not only new meanings for the text but also new models for governance and moral philosophy that would be debated throughout the next thousand years of Chinese intellectual history. By focusing on their uses of the I Ching, this study casts a unique light on the complex continuity-within-change and rich diversity of Sung culture.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691607761/?tag=2022091-20
1990
(Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center an...)
Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center and the periphery of an intellectual movement as has Shao Yung (1011-1077). Ethical model and eccentric, socialite and eremite, Shao Yung is perhaps not only the greatest enigma of early Neo-Confucianism, but also one of its undisputed giants. In this impressive life-and-thought study, Don J. Wyatt painstakingly sifts through all available evidence relating to Shao Yung and his scholarship to provide a portrait that fully exposes the moral center of the man and his work. Drawing on the abundant store of letters and accounts by Shao's contemporaries and his own much-neglected poetry, Wyatt has assembled a study that intimately relates Shao's life to his thought.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0824817559/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(Boundaries - demanding physical space, enclosing politica...)
Boundaries - demanding physical space, enclosing political entities, and distinguishing social or ethnic groups - constitute an essential aspect of historical investigation. It is especially with regard to disciplinary pluralism and historical breadth that this book most clearly departs and distinguishes itself from other works on Chinese boundaries and ethnicity. In addition to history, the disciplines represented in this book include anthropology (particularly ethnography), religion, art history, and literary studies. Each of the authors focuses on a distinct period, beginning with the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100 BCE) and ending with the early centuries after the Manchu conquest (c. CE 1800) - resulting in a chronological sweep of nearly three millennia.
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Frontiers-Boundaries-Geographies-Chinese-ebook/dp/B000PWQT5I/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(This collection examines the cultural and intellectual di...)
This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.
https://www.amazon.com/Battlefronts-Real-Imagined-Identity-Chinese/dp/1403960844/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the people...)
Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the peoples they encountered as "black." The earliest and most frequent of these encounters were with their Southeast Asian neighbors, specifically the Malayans. But by the midimperial times of the seventh through seventeenth centuries C.E., exposure to peoples from Africa, chiefly slaves arriving from the area of modern Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, gradually displaced the original Asian "blacks" in Chinese consciousness. In The Blacks of Premodern China, Don J. Wyatt presents the previously unexamined story of the earliest Chinese encounters with this succession of peoples they have historically regarded as black. A series of maritime expeditions along the East African coastline during the early fifteenth century is by far the best known and most documented episode in the story of China's premodern interaction with African blacks. Just as their Western contemporaries had, the Chinese aboard the ships that made landfall in Africa encountered peoples whom they frequently classified as savages. Yet their perceptions of the blacks they met there differed markedly from those of earlier observers at home in that there was little choice but to regard the peoples encountered as free. The premodern saga of dealings between Chinese and blacks concludes with the arrival in China of Portuguese and Spanish traders and Italian clerics with their black slaves in tow. In Chinese writings of the time, the presence of the slaves of the Europeans becomes known only through sketchy mentions of black bondservants. Nevertheless, Wyatt argues that the story of these late premodern blacks, laboring anonymously in China under their European masters, is but a more familiar extension of the previously untold story of their ancestors who toiled in Chinese servitude perhaps in excess of a millennium earlier.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VDHQNTF/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(This volume explores the relationship between culture and...)
This volume explores the relationship between culture and the military in Chinese society from early China to the Qing empire, with contributions by eminent scholars aiming to reexamine the relationship between military matters and law, government, historiography, art, philosophy, literature, and politics. The book critically investigates the perception that, due to the influence of Confucianism, Chinese culture has systematically devalued military matters. There was nothing inherently pacifist about the Chinese governments’ views of war, and pragmatic approaches - even aggressive and expansionist projects - often prevailed. Though it has changed in form, a military elite has existed in China from the beginning of its history, and military service included a large proportion of the population at any given time. Popular literature praised the martial ethos of fighting men. Civil officials attended constantly to military matters on the administrative and financial ends. The seven military classics produced in antiquity continued to be read even into the modern period. These original essays explore the ways in which intellectual, civilian, and literary elements helped shape the nature of military institutions, theory, and the culture of war. This important contribution bridges two literatures, military and cultural, that seldom appear together in the study of China, and deepens our understanding of war and society in Chinese history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674060725/?tag=2022091-20
2009
Don J. Wyatt was born on April 12, 1953, in Alton, Illinois, United States to the family of Robert Lee Wyatt and Sarah Cordelia Foster.
Don J. Wyatt graduated from Beloit College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975. He earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Harvard University in 1978 and 1984 respectively.
Don J. Wyatt is John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Middlebury College. He joined the faculty in 1986 and teaches courses in Chinese philosophy, Confucius and Confucianism, imperial China, modern China, early East Asia, modern East Asia, and China’s historical minorities. At one point or another, he has taught every lecture survey course in the existing East Asian history curriculum. However, his specialization is in courses incorporating the discipline of philosophy as well as history. His most recent scholarship addresses the formation of racial identities in China from ancient to early modern times. He is a past editor of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies and his own past and present research has profited from residencies spent at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Wyatt specializes in the history and philosophy of China, from early through modern. He is the author of “The Blacks of Premodern China” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and “Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
(This volume explores the relationship between culture and...)
2009(This collection examines the cultural and intellectual di...)
2004(Boundaries - demanding physical space, enclosing politica...)
2003(Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center an...)
1996(The I Ching, or Book of Changes, has been one of the two ...)
1990(Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the people...)
2009Quotations: "I write always with an eye toward history, and out of the desire to leave something of myself behind."
Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences Board of Trustees , United States
1994 - 1997
American Historical Association , United States
Association for Asian Studies , United States
Conference on Asian History , United States
New England Historical Association , United States
Phi Beta Kappa , United States
International Society for Intellectual History
Don J. Wyatt married Angela Mitchell Brande on October 19, 1991. They have two daughters Athena and Isis.