12 Facts About Yi-Fu Tuan

Yi-Fu Tuan was a Chinese-born American geographer and writer.

Yi-Fu Tuan was one of the key figures in human geography and arguably the most important originator of humanistic geography.

From New Mexico where he taught at the University of New Mexico from 1959 to 1965, Tuan then moved to Toronto between 1966 and 1968 teaching at University of Toronto.

Yi-Fu Tuan became a full professor at the University of Minnesota in 1968.

Yi-Fu Tuan was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1986, of the British Academy in 2001 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Yi-Fu Tuan was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1987 and the Vautrin Lud Prize in 2012.

Yi-Fu Tuan was an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yi-Fu Tuan occasionally gave lectures, continued to write his "Dear Colleague" letters and to publish new books on geosophy.

Yi-Fu Tuan describes his approach as humanist, however his humanism does not entail replacing spirituality with rationalism or promoting human beings as wholly self-directed.

Yi-Fu Tuan is most interested in ambivalent human experiences that resonate with the opposing pulls of space and place, the intimate and the distant.

Yi-Fu Tuan's approach is suggested by titles such as Segmented Worlds and Self, Continuity and Discontinuity, Morality and Imagination, Cosmos and Hearth, Dominance and Affection, and above all, Space and Place.

Yi-Fu Tuan has foregrounded the importance of language in the making of place.