E. Bruce Brooks, adjunct research professor of Chinese in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, died May 26.

A remembrance published on the HFA website can be found below, and a memory of Brooks written by his colleague, Professor Emeritus Alvin Cohen, was posted here.
 

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E. Bruce Brooks, a research professor of Chinese at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities & Fine Arts, died May 26, 2026.

Born June 23, 1936, in Akron, Ohio, Brooks attended Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, graduating in 1954. He received his Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory in 1958 and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1968. He taught at Harvard University and Smith College before coming to UMass Amherst, where he directed the Warring States Project from 1993 until his death.

His research focused on the Warring States period of China, the fourth and third centuries BCE. He argued that texts of the era long attributed to single authors were in fact composed by multiple hands over time — a claim he developed in “The Original Analects” (1998) and “The Emergence of China” (2015), both written with his wife and research partner, A. Taeko Brooks. He later applied the same analytical method, known as the Brooks Index of Rhetorical Diction, to the New Testament in “Jesus and After” (2017), and was working on similar studies of ancient Greek and Hebrew texts at the time of his death.

He is survived by his wife A. Taeko Brooks, and his son Clement Brooks of Indianapolis.