Dr. Knight Biggerstaff is an American historian of China. He received his Ph. D. from Harvard University and was the first Harvard-Yenching Fellow. During World War II, he served the U.S. State Department as a China specialist. From 1946 to 1956, he headed the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University and was also the facilitator of the former The Journal of Asian Studies. Dr. Knight was the first generation of American Scholar to study original Chinese historical texts. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities in 1962.