Joseph Francis Fletcher, Jr. (1934–1984) was an American historian of China and Central Asia and a professor in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department of

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. His main areas of research included interaction between the Islamic and Chinese worlds, Manchu and Mongol studies.

Biography

Fletcher graduated from

in 1957. He received his PhD from Harvard's Department of Far Eastern Languages in 1965 and became an assistant professor within the department a year later. In 1972, he was appointed professor of Chinese and Central Asian History. Fletcher died from complications related to cancer on 14 June 1984, at the age of 49.

Personal life

Fletcher was the son of

Joseph Fletcher Joseph Francis Fletcher (April 10, 1905 – October 28, 1991) was an American professor who founded the theory of situational ethics in the 1960s. A pioneer in the field of bioethics. Fletcher was a leading academic proponent of the potential b ...

, an ethicist. Fletcher had two children.

Notable works

Joseph Fletcher contributed several chapters (" Ch'ing Inner Asia, c. 1800" and others) to volume 10 of ''The Cambridge History of China''. Joseph Fletcher's posthumously published work, ''The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China'' (Variorum, 1995), remains one of the main English-languages sources on the introduction of

Sufism Sufism ( or ) is a mysticism, mystic body of religious practice found within Islam which is characterized by a focus on Islamic Tazkiyah, purification, spirituality, ritualism, and Asceticism#Islam, asceticism. Practitioners of Sufism are r ...

into China, and is extensively cited by practically all books in English on

Islam in China Islam has been practiced in China since the 7th century CE.. There are an estimated 17–25 million Muslims in China, less than 2 percent of the total population. Though Hui people, Hui Muslims are the most numerous group, the greatest concentr ...

published since then. Another posthumously published work by Fletcher, the unfinished essay "Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–1800", is an early argument in favor of applying the early modern periodization to all of Eurasia and a preliminary exploration of its global applicability.

References

External links

The Joseph Fletcher Memorial Lecture
biography and bibliography.

American sinologists American historians of Islam Harvard University faculty 1934 births 1984 deaths 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Mongolists Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Historians of Central Asia 20th-century American male writers {{Islamic-scholar-stub