Elizabeth J. Perry

Her book, Shanghai on Strike: the Politics of Chinese Labor (1993) won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association. Her article "From Mencius to Mao – and Now: Chinese Conceptions of Socioeconomic Rights" (2008) won the Heinz Eulau Prize from the American Political Science Association. Perry received honorary doctorate degrees from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The Asian Studies Library at her undergraduate alma mater has been named in her honor. She also holds honorary professorships at eight major Chinese universities.

When China and the US resumed academic exchange in 1979, she spent a year at Nanjing University as a visiting scholar, researching Chinese secret societies under Cai Shaoqing and the Taiping Rebellion under Mao Jiaqi [zh].

Perry took her first teaching job at the University of Arizona before becoming an assistant, then associate professor at the University of Washington (1978-1990); she then taught at the University of California, Berkeley as Robson Professor of Political Science, 1990-1997 before moving to Harvard.

She returned to the United States and attended William Smith College, where she earned her B.A. summa cum laude in 1969. In 1978, she received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan where her dissertation advisors included Michel Oksenberg, Norma Diamond, Albert Feuerwerker, and Allen Whiting. Her doctoral thesis explored the tradition of peasant rebellions of the Huaibei region of North China and the Communist Revolution.

Perry was born in Shanghai, shortly before the Chinese Communist Revolution, to American missionary parents who were professors at St. John's University. She grew up in Tokyo, Japan in the 1950s and participated in the 1960 Anpo protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Elizabeth J. Perry, FBA (Chinese: 裴宜理; pinyin: Péi Yílǐ; born 9 September 1948) is an American scholar of Chinese politics and history at Harvard University, where she is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as Director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research from 1999 to 2003 and as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2007.