Past ACCFs

Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA

Tu Weiming, Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, was born in 1940 in Kunming, China. He grew up in Taiwan and obtained a B.A. in Chinese Studies at Tunghai University (1961). He received his M.A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1968) in history and East Asian studies at Harvard University. Tu has taught Chinese intellectual history, philosophies of China, and Confucian humanism at Princeton University (1967-71) and University of California at Berkeley (1971-81). He also taught at Peking University, Taiwan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Ecole des Haute Etudes in Paris.

Tu has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981. He holds honorary professorships from Zhejing, Sun Yat-sen, Suzhou, Renmin, and Foreign Languages Universities and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and has been awarded honorary degrees from Lehigh, Michigan State (Grand Valley), Shandong, Tunghai , and Lingnan Universities. He was invited by the United Nations as a member of the Group of Eminent Persons to facilitate the Dialogue among Civilizations in 2001 and gave a presentation on civilizational dialogue to the Executive Board of UNESCO in 2004. He is an international advisor of Rahman University in Kuala Lumpur, chair of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, a vice-president of the International Confucian Association in Beijing, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tu has published over a dozen books in English. His five-volume collected works were published in China in 2001. He is currently studying the modern transformation of Confucian humanism in East Asia and tapping Confucian spiritual resources for human flourishing in the global community.