John Wills
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Four Decades of Contribution
John Wills, Jr., who brought Asia to the College history department,
retires as a professor of history at the end of this academic year,
nearly four decades after he joined the USC faculty.
When he came here, American universities were most often cast from a
Eurocentric mold. USC had several fine scholars in East Asian studies,
but Wills, an expert on China, was the first member of the history
faculty with a specialty outside Europe and the Americas.
Wills served as acting chair of the Department of East Asian Languages
and Cultures from 1987 to 1989 and as director of the East Asian
Studies Center from 1990 to 1994.
“I got involved way back in the 1970s in thinking about the direction
of the General Education program,” he says. “We developed a solid set
of changes that lasted roughly from 1980 through 1995.”
He says that one of the developments that came out of the planning
process was the agreement that USC’s General Education program would
require a course in non-Western cultures. This helped increase the
range of offerings in East Asian languages, culture, and history when
USC was just becoming a major research university on the Pacific Rim.
Teaching Chinese history was easy for Wills. Locating appropriate
materials was not. In planning a survey course for the General
Education program, Will had to cobble together bits and pieces to
provide good readings for his students.
“I thought it was getting tiresome pulling these texts together, and
often there was nothing adequate,” he says. “So I thought to myself,
‘why don’t I write the whole darn thing?I tested the chapters on my
students throughout the 1980s, so that by the early 1990s I had written
the whole book. And to my considerable surprise it was accepted. So I
dedicated the book to my students at USC.”
“Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History” was published by
Princeton University Press in 1994. Wills says the book is an example
of how publishing and teaching efforts can support each other. His
other books include “Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India
Company and China, 1662-1681” (Harvard University Press, 1974); “From
Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century
China” (Yale University Press, 1979, co-edited with Jonathan D.
Spence); “Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to
K’ang-hsi, 1666-1687” (Harvard, 1984); and “1688: A Global History”
(W.W. Norton, 2001).
Shortly after he leaves USC, Wills will travel to China and Vietnam. He
plans to lecture, research and write during retirement. He sums it up
this way: “I plan to do the exact same things I’m doing now—except
grade papers.”
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