Stephen Owen, an American sinologist, died on May 1, 2026, at age 79.
He specialized in Chinese literature, particularly Tang dynasty poetry and comparative poetics, and taught Chinese literature and comparative literature at Harvard University, where he was James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus. Born in St.
Louis, Missouri, on October 30, 1946, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. there in 1972. He taught at Yale until 1982, then moved to Harvard. Owen completed a six-volume annotated translation of the surviving poems of Du Fu in 2015 and shared the 2018 Tang Prize in Sinology with Yoshinobu Shiba.
Stephen Owen, 79, American sinologist.