AHA award

Patricia Buckley Ebrey received her PhD from Columbia University in 1975. Since then, she taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign until 1998, when she joined the history department at the University of Washington, where she continues to work today.Ebrey is the premier historian of Chinese women during the millennium-­plus of the early and middle empire. That enormous topic has led her to explore numerous subfields: food and funerals, marriage and money, painting and politics, writing and religion, inheritance and intellectuals. Her prize-­winning book on Song Dynasty (960–1279) women, The Inner Quarters(1993), remains the most important treatment of that pivotal period of women’s history. Her first book, on the early imperial aristocracy, was translated into Chinese 34 years after it first appeared—testimony to the enduring quality of its scholarship.

Ebrey’s work often uses exceedingly difficult sources, of sorts rarely conducive to either numerous publications or large audiences. Yet she has combined a great deal of highly focused research with highly accessible books on broad topics. Along with a synthetic history of Chinese women from ancient to modern times, she has coauthored multiple editions of textbooks in both East Asian and world history, produced the extremely successful, single-­authored Cambridge Illustrated History of China (translated into nine languages), and compiled and edited two major collections of primary documents. Various topics that were once “unteachable” for lack of either sources or scholarship in English are now routinely covered because she helped fill those gaps. The past is a bigger and a less foreign country thanks to Pat Ebrey.

From: http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2014/awards-prizes-and-honors-conferred-at-the-128th-annual-meeting

Previous recipients: http://www.historians.org/awards-and-grants/past-recipients/award-for-scholarly-distinction-recipients