Spence taught a popular undergraduate course at
Yale University on the history of modern China, which formed the basis for his book
The Search for Modern China (1990). He taught at Yale for more than 40 years. During this time he wrote many books on China that furthered the understanding of the country and its culture with Western audiences. Some of his books during this period included
The Search for Modern China (1990), which was published on the back of the
Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and ''God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
(1996). and The Gate of Heavenly Peace'', a study of twentieth-century intellectuals and their relation to revolution. He retired from Yale in 2008. His book
The Search for Modern China was a
New York Times best seller and documented the evolution of China starting from the decline of the
Ming dynasty in the early 1600s to the pro-democracy movement of 1989, while his book
Treason by the Book (2001) documented the story of a scholar who took on the third
Manchu Emperor in the 1700s. and an honorary professor at
Nanjing University. and in 2006, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He received the William C. DeVane Medal of the Yale Chapter of
Phi Beta Kappa (1952); a
Guggenheim Fellowship (1979); the
Los Angeles Times History Prize (1982), and the Vursel Prize of the
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1983). He was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), named a
MacArthur Fellow (1988), appointed to the Council of Scholars of the
Library of Congress (1988), elected a member of the
American Philosophical Society (1993), and named a corresponding fellow of the
British Academy (1997). In 2010, Spence was appointed to deliver the annual
Jefferson Lecture at the
Library of Congress, the US federal government's highest honour for achievement in the
humanities. ==Personal life==