Jonathan D. Spence was born in 1936 in Surrey, England. From 1993 to 2008, he was a Sterling Professor of history at Yale University, where he specialized in Chinese history. Spence has published more than a dozen books on China, including The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and The Search for Modern China. He has been awarded many honors for his scholarship, including the William C. DeVane Medal of the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1952); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979); the Los Angeles Times History Prize (1982); the Vursel Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1983); and a MacArthur Fellowship (1988). He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress (1988), and the American Philosophical Society (1993), and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy (1997).