Serge Elisséeff (French pronunciation: [sɛʁʒ əliseɛf]; born Sergei Grigorievich Eliseyev; 13 January 1889 – 13 April 1975) was a Russian-French scholar, Japanologist, and professor at Harvard University.

The American Japanologist Edwin O. Reischauer, who was one of Elisséeff's students, wrote that "perhaps no one better deserves the title of Father of Far Eastern Studies in the United States."

He had close personal ties to many of the greatest Japanese literary names of the early 20th century and wrote occasional articles for the Asahi Shimbun.

Serge Elisséeff was born "Sergei Grigorievich Eliseyev" (Russian: Сергей Григорьевич Елисеев) on 13 January 1889 in St. Petersburg.

[5] In 1899, at age 10, Elisséeff began attending Larinsky College, a gymnasium in St. Petersburg, where he received a traditional education in the Latin and Greek Classics.

[5] As a youth, Elisséeff initially desired to pursue a career in oil painting, but was convinced by his Russian literature teacher that his wealthy background would prevent him from "knowing the suffering that any creative art requires", and that he should become a scholar of the humanities instead.

[6] His teacher arranged for Elisséeff to meet with Sergey Oldenburg, the secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russia's preeminent scholar of East Asia.

[17] He spent the next two summers in Japan working on a Ph.D. dissertation on Bashō, but was devastated upon returning to Russia in the fall of 1917: the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution had allowed the Bolsheviks to take over the banking system, in which the Elisséeff's family fortune was seized, and the manuscript of his nearly completed dissertation was confiscated from the diplomatic pouch in which he had mailed it home and burned.

[4] Elisséeff was the first director of the Harvard–Yenching Institute (HYI), an independent, non-profit organization founded in 1928 to further the spread of knowledge and scholarship on East and Southeast Asia.

[21] Elisséeff resigned his position of director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1956, then the following year accepted emeritus status from Harvard and returned to Paris to his professorship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, then later retired.

The prominent American Japanologist Edwin O. Reischauer, who was one of Elisséeff's students, wrote that "perhaps no one better deserves the title of Father of Far Eastern Studies in the United States.

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Serge Elisséeff, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 100+ publications in 10 languages and 1,500+ library holdings.