Mary Evelyn TUCKER

Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar, Yale University

Professor Tucker received her PhD at Columbia University under the Confucian scholar William Theodore de Bary. She is now a senior lecturer at Yale University, where she has appointments in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Divinity School, as well as the Department of Religious Studies. Her special area of study is Asian religions. Her concern about the growing environmental challenges led her to help shape a new interdisciplinary field linking religion and ecology. Professor Tucker directs the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with her husband, John Grim.

She is the co-author of Journey of the Universe with Brian Thomas Swimme and the executive producer of the Emmy Award winning film with John Grim. The film is the centre piece of massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Yale/Coursera, available also in Chinese. She has published several books on Confucianism including The Philosophy of Qi (Columbia University Press) and Moral and Spiritual Confucianism in Japanese Confucianism (SUNY). She has co-edited Confucianism and Ecology (Harvard University Press) and two volumes with Harvard and Peking University professor Tu Weiming on Confucian Spirituality (Crossroad). She has been a member of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies since chairing it from 1985-1989. She is also an associate of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard since 1995.