Martin Bernal

Martin Gardiner Bernal (; 10 March 1937 – 9 June 2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine. Early life and education Bernal was born and grew up in Hampstead, London, the son of the physicist John Desmond Bernal and artists' patron Margaret Gardiner. He was educated at Dartington Hall School and then at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a degree in 1961 with first-class Honours in the Oriental Studies Tripos. At that time he specialised in the language and history of China, and spent some time at the Peking University. He carried on as a graduate student at Cambridge, and with the assistance of the Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship also at University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, finishing his PhD in Cambridge in 1965 with thesis titled Chinese Socialism to 1913 when he was elected a fellow at King's. Career In 1972 Bernal moved to Cornell University in New York, United States. There he resided in the Telluride House as a faculty fellow, and became a full professor in 1988. He taught there for the rest of his career, retiring in 2001. Initially he taught Government Studies at Cornell, and continued his research on modern Chinese history. Under the impact of the Vietnam War he had also developed an interest in Vietnamese history and culture, and learned the Vietnamese language.