Peter Bol (historian)
American historian
Peter Kees Bol (Chinese: 包弼德; pinyin: Bāo Bìdé; born 1948) is an American historian and sinologist. He is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Since 2013, he has been a Vice Provost of Harvard with oversight of HarvardX and the Harvard Initiative in Learning and Teaching (HILT). He is the founding director of the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, and also directs the China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS) and the China Biographical Database (CBDB) project.
Biography
Peter Bol earned his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Princeton University in 1980. His main research focus is China's cultural elites during the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties (from the 7th to the 17th century). He and William C. Kirby together teach ChinaX, a Harvard massive open online course (MOOC) with a worldwide enrollment of more than 45,000 students.
Bol has been a Vice Provost of Harvard University between 2013 and 2018. In this role, he oversaw HarvardX (open online learning) and the Harvard Initiative in Learning and Teaching (HILT). He is the founding director of the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, and also directs the China Historical Geographic Information System (in collaboration with Fudan University in Shanghai), and the China Biographical Database project (in collaboration with Academia Sinica in Taiwan and Peking University).
The public source identifies “Peter Bol (historian)” as american historian. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Peter, historian and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q43355457. VIAF identifies the subject as 56906098. The Library of Congress control number is n86872049. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 2013, 1980 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Bol (historian)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.