Together with William Kirby, Bol teaches ChinaX (SW12x), a Harvard course that has a global enrollment of over 45,000. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is the author of “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China, Neo-Confucianism in History, coauthor of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I-ching (Princeton, 1990), co-editor of Ways with Words (California, 2000), and various journal articles in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. Bol also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai in the creation of a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. Bol directs an additional Harvard collaboration, the China Biographical Database project, with Academia Sinica, and Peking University. This online relational database currently contains some 350,000 historical figures and is being expanded to include all biographical data in China’s historical record over the last 2,000 years. Bol received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Princeton in 1980.
包弼德(Peter K. Bol)，美國著名中國思想史研究學者。1982年獲美國普林斯頓大學歷史學博士學位。1985年起任哈佛大學副教授、教授、講座教授，1997—2002年任東亞語言文明系主任，現任哈佛大學副教務長、地理分析中心主任等職。他致力於唐宋思想史研究，出版著作多部，其代表作《斯文：唐宋思想的轉型》(“This Culture of Ours”:Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China)及《歷史上的理學》(Neo-Confucianism in History)均被譯成中文出版。後者還為他贏得了哈佛大學2009年度卡波特獎(Walter Channing Cabot Fellow)。2015年，包弼德獲美國地理學家協會年度榮譽地理學家稱號。歷史學家出身的包弼德，不僅是一位著名的中國思想史研究專家，而且在數位化教育方面也作出了出色的貢獻。作為負責教學創新的副教務長，他在推廣地理分析的教學與研究，以及線上教學方面的成果令人矚目。2005年，他在哈佛大學發起全校範圍的討論，最終創辦哈佛大學地理分析中心(Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis)並出任首屆主任。他主持哈佛大型線上公開課項目(HarvardX)，並擔任哈佛大學中國歷史地理資訊系統(The China Historical Geographic Information System，CHGIS)專案主任以及中國歷代人物傳記資料庫(The China Biographical Database，CBDB)項目主任等職。