April 26, 1971

Asian historian Arthur F. Wright, Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University, gave the C. Mildred Thompson lecture, entitled, “T’ang T’ai-tsung, 626-649 AD: Toward a Psychological Biography of China’s Greatest Ruler.” Professor Wright contributed an essay on the great emperor of the T’ang Dynasty, T’ang T’a-tsung (599–49), “T’ang T’ai-tsung and Buddism,” to Perspectives on the T’ang, which he co-edited with Denis Teitchett and which appeared from Yale University Press in 1973.

The Thompson lectureship, given by an anonymous donor, honored American historian C. Mildred Thompson ’03, who taught in the history department from 1910 until 1923, when she became Vassar’s dean, a position she held until her retirement in 1948. Dean Thompson died in 1975.