Editing East Asian Studies (University of Toronto) (section)

==History of the Department==
  	 
The University of Toronto has a long history of producing scholars who have deeply shaped the various fields that make up East Asian Studies. At the turn of the twentieth century, James Scarth Gale wrote one of the first English language histories of Korea and published foundational Korean grammars as well as translations of Korean literature. His papers are housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library today. In the early 1920s, Bishop William C. White began his missionary career in China where he soon became famous for the antiquities he amassed, a collection that eventually became the basis of the Royal Ontario Museum and the core of the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian library. In the 1930s, Herbert Norman began to publish new works on Japanese history that were to offer a radical challenge to many of the conventions and assumptions of his field.

The institutionalization of the study of East Asia at the University of Toronto built on these illustrious beginnings when Bishop White returned from China in 1934 to set up and curate the Far Eastern Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum, then part of the University of Toronto. The following year White became the first professor of Chinese studies, laying the foundation for the wartime establishment of a School of Chinese Studies in 1943. Nine students enrolled in the first year of this program. Shortly after the war, the School added Japanese and Indian studies, becoming the Department of East Asiatic Studies. By 1971, a separate Department of Sanskrit and Indian studies was established, allowing the formation of a Department of East Asian Studies that expanded its offerings on Japan and, by 1977, had added courses on Korea. Since then, the department has experienced tremendous growth, hiring faculty to build a rich program whose excellence lies in the interdisciplinary study of the East Asian humanities.