Bernard Solomon

Bernard Simon Solomon died December 2, 2022 in New York City.

He received a B.S. in Mathematics in 1946 from the City College of New York (CCNY), served in the Army Cavalry Corps, and enrolled in the Army Language Training Institute in California to study Chinese. In 1949 he received his M.A. degree from Harvard in Far Eastern Languages (now East Asian Languages), and in 1952 received his PhD in Far Eastern Languages.

Between 1952 and 1958 he was a Research Assistant on the Harvard-Yenching Institute Chinese-English dictionary project. He was also a Fulbright Research Fellow at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1955-1956. From 1959 to 1962, he was Assistant Professor of Chinese at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Between 1962 and 1986, he became Professor of Chinese in the Department of Classical and Oriental Languages at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), where he taught Chinese language (modern and classical), literature and civilization, and founded the programs in Chinese and East Asian Studies.

He received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship grant, 1967-1968, and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) grant, 1977-1978, to pursue his research into the works of the ancient Chinese School of Names. His scholarly works include The Veritable Record of the T’ang Emperor Shun-tsung (Harvard University Press, 1955) and On the School of Names in Ancient China (Monumenta Serica Monograph 64, 2013). He was also co-editor of The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms by Ssu-ma Kuang (Harvard University Press, 1952).

Besides his significant scholarly accomplishments, he was a master teacher who was much beloved by his students at Queens College, many of whom were inspired to pursue scholarship and teaching in Chinese studies under his influence.