Nancy S. Steinhardt

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt (, born July 14, 1954) is an American historian of Chinese architecture. Introduced to Chinese architecture by Nelson Ikon Wu, she studied at Harvard University, becoming a Harvard Fellow and receiving her PhD in 1981. She began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, and became a curator of the Penn Museum in 1998. She received a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001, and an Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 2021 for her book China: An Architectural History.

Biography Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt was born on July 14, 1954. Learning Chinese in her youth, she did undergraduate study at Washington University in St. Louis, where she was introduced to Chinese art and architecture by professor Nelson Ikon Wu. In 1974, she began graduate study at Harvard University. Seeking to explore subjects outside of painting, the typical focus of Chinese art programs in the United States, she studied the temple of Yongle Gong for her master's thesis. She was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978 to 1981. She received her PhD in 1981, with her doctoral thesis Imperial Architecture Under Mongolian Patronage focusing on the Yuan dynasty city of Khanbaliq. She began teaching at Bryn Mawr College after receiving her doctorate, concurrently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania the following year.

Leaving Bryn Mawr, Steinhardt became an assistant professor of East Asian art in 1983, replacing Schuyler Cammann upon his retirement. She was able to visit China, previously closed to western academics, for the first time that year. She was promoted to an associate professorship in 1991, and an associate curator of Chinese art at the Penn Museum in 1994. Four years later, she was promoted to professor and curator. She became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001. She published China: An Architectural History in 2019, for which she received the 2021 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award.