Henry Ginsburg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Henry Ginsburg (born November 5, 1940 in New York - † March 29, 2007 in London ) was the curator of Southeast Asian manuscripts at the British Library and the leading expert on Thai literature .

Life

Henry Ginsburg was the child of prominent New York art dealers Benjamin and Cora Ginsburg, who were of Russian Jewish descent. Even in his youth, Henry was an accomplished pianist who could even consider pursuing this subject professionally.

After attending Tanytown High School in New York, Ginsburg studied Russian at Columbia University and then served at the American Peace Corps in Thailand . Here he taught the English language in Chachoengsao , near Bangkok . He fell in love with this country and its culture, which led him to abandon his music career and take up a PhD in Thai literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

In 1967 he moved to the UK and worked at the British Museum as an assistant for the collection of Thai literature. When the British Library became an independent body in 1973, Ginsburg was appointed curator of the Thai and Cambodian collections. His part-time contract gave him enough time to pursue his own research and - to a lesser extent - to collect and trade in Thai and European manuscripts and materials. In the 1970s he also taught at the University of California, Berkeley .

In July 2006, Ginsburg became a British citizen without surrendering his US passport.

plant

Ginsburg wrote the first Western work on painting in Thai literature ( Thai Manuscript Painting , 1989), which had previously received little research. Parts of the collection of the British Library were exhibited in Bangkok in 1996 in the Thailand Cultural Center and later described by Ginsburg in his work Thai Art and Culture: historic manuscripts from Western collections (2000).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1548186/Henry-Ginsburg.html Obituary in English (last accessed October 30, 2012).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ginsburg, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-British literary scholar and curator
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 2007
Place of death London