Dr. Anthony C. Yu, Academician of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, died on May 12, 2015 in Chicago at age 77.

Born into a Hong Kong family where two generations were already fluent in English, Dr. Anthony C. Yu (1938-2015) became bi-lingual when he was a child.  He had personal tutelage from his grandfather who gave him intensive training in classical Chinese poetry. His education at high school, college and graduate school provided him with a firm knowledge of modern and classical Western languages. 

With his linguistic proficiency came his early aspiration to master the Western tradition of humanistic learning. In 1969, he began to teach comparative religion and literature at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph. D.  A few years later, Dr. Yu found he was also intrigued by Sinology; initial research of Xiyou ji or the Journey to the West in the early 1970s led eventually to the completion, in 1984, of the first annotated translation in English of the full-length novel (4 vols; Univ. of Chicago Press). He was elected a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in year 2000.

Dr. Yu’s interest in Sinology and comparative literature also finds its manifestation in the publication of three other important books, plus some minor ones: 1) Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton Univ. Press, 2007); 2) State and Religion in China: Historical and Textual Perspectives (Open Court Press, 2005); 3) Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West (Columbia Univ. Press, 2009).  The revised version of the Journey to the West made its appearance in 2012, only 3 years before Dr. Yu died as the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the Divinity School, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English, and the Committee on Social Thought.