John Whitney Hall (September 13, 1916 – October 21, 1997),[1] was an American academic, historian, editor and professor at Yale University.[2]
Hall was born in Kyoto in 1916. He lived in Japan until he was a teenager. According to his wife, "Being brought up in Japan and by missionaries, he was a very straight-arrow kind of person. There is this kind of missionary feeling, that you must make something of this [life], not just throw it away."[2]
At Amherst College, he was awarded a degree in 1939. He returned to Japan an instructor in English at Doshisha University in Kyoto until 1941.[2]
Hall earned his Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures from Harvard University in 1950. At Harvard, he became one of the first graduate students to study under Edwin O. Reischauer.[2]
In 1948, Hall began teaching at the University of Michigan.[3]
His earliest book was Tanuma Okitsugu, 1718-1787.[4] Among other interests, his research focused on the Kamakura period in the history of Japan.[5]
He taught at Yale University until he retired in 1983.[2] Yale's John W. Hall Lecture Series in Japanese Studies was established in his memory.[6]
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about John Whitney Hall, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 90+ works in 200+ publications in 8 languages and 10,000+ library holdings[7]
Since 1994, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) has awarded the John Whitney Hall Book Prize for an English language book published on Japan[9] or Korea.[10]