Profile of Tu Weiming

Dr. Tu Weiming is the Director of the Harvard Yenching Institute. Weiming has been a Professor of Chinese history and philosophy and of Confucian Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University since 1981. Weiming earned a B.A. at Tunghai University in Taiwan and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages at Harvard University. Weiming is the first professor of Confucian studies at any English-language university, a position awarded to him in 1999.

A member of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard, the chair of the Academic Sinica's advisory committee on the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Weiming is currently interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for the emerging global community. He taught for thirteen years at both Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley on the subject of Chinese intellectual history. Additionally, Weiming taught Confucian humanism at Peking University in Taiwan, at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and the University of Paris.

Weiming is the author of major publications in Chinese and English, including: Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming's Youth; Centrality and Commonality, An Essay on Confucian Religiousness; Humanity and Self-Cultivation; Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation; Wang, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual. He has contributed a section on Confucian spirituality to a forthcoming encyclopedia on the history of the religious quest and an essay for a report of the U.S. President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

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• Harvard Yenching Institute