John A. Larkin 1936–2021

Abstract

© Ateneo de Manila University 70, NO. 2 (2022) 321–33 On 29 July 2021, his eighty-fifth birthday, John A. “Jack” Larkin passed away in Buffalo, New York. He had first moved to that city fifty-five years earlier, after completing his New York University (NYU) doctorate with the dissertation “The Evolution of Pampangan Society: A Case Study of Social and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines” (1966). Having initially joined Theodore W. Friend as one of two Southeast Asianists in the history department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Jack ultimately soldiered on alone there as a historian of the region until his retirement in 2005. Born in Sharon, Connecticut, Jack earned his secondary school diploma just across the New York State line, at the Millbrook School—also the alma mater of the late Indonesianist John R. W. Smail and the distinguished historian of Cambodia David Chandler. Having devoted himself to undergraduate dramatics, Jack received his bachelor’s degree in English from Yale College in 1958. Following military service, he returned to New Haven to complete a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies under the tutelage of Harry J. Benda. Benda was a mentor whose influence on Jack remained profound; the two men would coedit a source book of readings on Southeast Obituary