Congratulations to Professor Bryan Lowe, who has received a grant from the Princeton Histories Fund, which supports the exploration of “aspects of Princeton’s history that have been forgotten, overlooked, subordinated, or suppressed,” for a project on Kenneth Ch’en’s Legacy for Asian and Asian-American Faculty and the Study of Asian Religions at Princeton. Professor Kenneth Ch’en (1907–1993) joined the Princeton Department of Religion in 1961 as one of few Asian American faculty at the time, and possibly the first Asian American full professor at Princeton. He was the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion from 1968-1971. A distinguished and renowned scholar of Buddhist Studies and Sinology, Ch’en expanded Princeton’s curricular offerings beyond the study of Western religions, but his contributions to the university remain largely unknown. 

Professor Lowe writes about the project, “By examining his career and experience at Princeton, I hope to shed new light on the contribution of scholars of Asian heritage to the University’s intellectual life, particularly in the humanities. The project will also explore the broader contributions of Asian and Asian-American scholars to the founding of Buddhist Studies in North America. In doing so, the project hopes to combat a narrative that reduces Buddhist Studies to a discipline initiated by white scholars in Europe and North America and to help recover the life story of one of Princeton’s first and most prominent Asian-American scholars.”

This first stage of the two-year project will involve conducting archival research about Kenneth Ch’en’s contributions to Princeton and conducting oral histories with his family, including his son, Leighton Ch’en ’66. The project will culminate in a conference and the production of a video to “shed new light on Princeton’s history and the history of Buddhist Studies as a field.”