Yi-Fu Tuan
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Yi-Fu Tuan (born 5 December 1930) is a Chinese-American geographer.
Tuan was born in 1930 in Tientsin, China. He was the son of a middle-class diplomat and was part of the educated class in the then Republic of China.
Tuan graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955 respectively. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Early career
Tuan's major field of study in his earlier years of academia was geomorphology, the study of landforms.
He followed his love for the desert and landforms to New Mexico where he was employed as a tenure-track professor in 1959, doubling the size of the University of New Mexico's geography department. There he got the motivation and inspiration he needed from the starkness and remoteness of the New Mexico desert. As a member of a two-person department Tuan had a large teaching schedule, but little if any pressure to produce material for publication. This gave Tuan ample time to focus his attentions back to human geography.
In addition to the New Mexico landscape and isolation, Tuan received inspiration from J.B. Jackson, who published Landscape in Santa Fe. This magazine combined geography with philosophy.
Later career
From New Mexico Tuan first moved to Tornoto between 1966-68 teaching at University of Toronto.Then he eventually became a full professor at the University of Minnesota in 1968. There he began his focus on systematic humanistic geography. He describes the content of human geography from his wonderings about "the glories and miseries of human existence, observable on the streets as well as in colleges."
After fourteen years at the University of Minnesota, he then moved to Madison, Wisconsin, citing the impending doom of a mid-life crisis that turned out to be mild. Tuan concluded his professional career at University of Wisconsin - Madison, in 1998.
Today Yi-Fu Tuan is a retired professor-emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He gives many lectures and has recently published a book entitled Place, Art and Self. He resides in Wisconsin.
A notable contribution of his to the field of geography is the concept of topophilia, presented in his book, Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Tuan claims that topophilia "can be defined widely so as to include all emotional connections between physical environment and human beings."
External link
- [Yi-Fu Tuan's homepage] at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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