He taught at Ramapo College in New Jersey between 1972 and 1974, and was an associate professor for Chinese and Inner Asian History at the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies of Indiana University from 1974 to 1978.
He was subsequently appointed associate professor of Chinese and Central Asian History and Philology and Curator of the Far Eastern Library at the University of Chicago.
[2] During the late 1970s and early 1980s Kwanten published a number of articles on the extinct Tangut language, as well as a book-length study of the Chinese glosses in the 12th-century Chinese-Tangut glossary, Pearl in the Palm.
[3] In the 1980s he moved to Taiwan, where he taught Chinese border history at the National Chengchi University in Taipei, and worked as the Belgian Foreign Trade Advisor.
[4] Kwanten and his wife, Lily Chen, were married in Taipei in 1985 and they had three children combined from previous marriages, the eldest of whom, Wendy King, runs the Honolulu office of Big Apple.