Robert P. Hymes^[1] is an American historian and sinologist whose work has focused on the socio-cultural history of early modern China.^[2] Hymes is the Horace Walpole Carpentier Professor of Oriental Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.^[3]

Hymes received his B.A. from Columbia College, his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarship has focused on Chinese society during the Song and Yuan dynasties.^[4]

Hymes won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize twice from the Association for Asian Studies for his books Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge, 1986) and Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (California, 2002).^[5]