Wilma Cannon Fairbank

Wilma Denio Cannon Fairbank (April 23, 1909 – April 4, 2002) (Chinese: 费慰梅 Fei Weimei) was an American artist, scholar of Chinese art and architecture, and diplomat. Her scholarship on the Han dynasty Wu Liang tombs, which she started in early 1930s, was pioneering and influential in emphasizing artistic and architectural rather than approaches that emphasized the iconography. Following World War Two she served as cultural officer in the American Embassy in China, and in the 1950s she continued research and published articles, reviews, and translations. She was an organizer and founding member of the Far Eastern Association, which became the Association for Asian Studies.

Her husband, John King Fairbank, was an historian of modern China. Their daughters were Laura King Fairbank Haynes, a registered nurse, and Holly Cannon Fairbank Tuck, a dance and arts executive.^[1] She was a member of the Institute for Research in Chinese Architecture.^[2][3] After her husband became a professor at Harvard University, she was a faculty wife and mother, which she later called "a terrific drop in status".^[4]

In 2002 she died in the Cambridge house where she had lived for more than fifty years, a fifteen-minute walk from the Cambridge house where she was born.^[5]