Serge Elisséeff

Serge Elisséeff (French pronunciation: [sɛʁʒ əliseɛf]; born Sergei Grigorievich Eliseyev; 13 January 1889 – 13 April 1975) was a Russian-French scholar, Japanologist, and professor at Harvard University. He was one of the first Westerners to study Japanese at a university in Japan. He began studying Japanese at the University of Berlin, then transferred to Tokyo Imperial University (today's University of Tokyo) in 1912, becoming the first Westerner to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University in Japanese as well as its first Western graduate student.

Elisséeff served in 1916 as Privat-Dozent at Petrograd Imperial University (modern Saint Petersburg State University), and in 1917 as Professor in the Institute for the History of Foreign Affairs in Petrograd. In the 1930s he became a professor of Far Eastern Languages at Harvard, where he became the first director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and founded the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.

Fluent in eight languages, including Chinese and Japanese, Elisséeff was one of the foremost Japanologists of his time, both in the West and in Japan. The American Japanologist Edwin O. Reischauer, who was one of Elisséeff's students, wrote that "perhaps no one better deserves the title of Father of Far Eastern Studies in the United States." He had close personal ties to many of the greatest Japanese literary names of the early 20th century and wrote occasional articles for the Asahi Shimbun.