Feng Tianyu

Born in March 1942 in Hong'an City of Hubei Province；

Taught at the History Department of Wuhan Normal College and the Research Institute of Ideological and Cultural History of Hubei University before becoming a professorat Wuhan University in 1994;

Received the title of “Yong & Middle-aged Expert with Outstanding Contributions to China” in 1986.

Feng Tianyu, a cultural historian, is now the Director of WHU Research Center of Traditional Chinese Culture -- one of the Key Research Bases for Humanities and Social Science designated by the Ministry of Education, and the head of the innovative program “Traditional Chinese Culture and Its Modern Transformation”. He used to be a member of the Social Science Committee of the Ministry of Education, the Vice President of the Chinese History Society and the Deputy Director of the Academic Degrees Committee of Wuhan University. He has long been engaged in the study on the ideological and cultural history of China to explore the formation of a framework of Chinese cultural history and the myth of the cultural history of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Combining both macro-control and micro-analysis, Feng has, in his research work, taken into consideration argumentation, textual criticism, and organization of writing in the research on such topics as the Chinese cultural ecology, Chinese cultural features, and interaction between Chinese and foreign cultures, leading to the publishing of over 100 papers in journals like Social Sciences in China, and A Study of History, and many books such as On the Cultural History of Ming and Qing Dynasties,Chinese Culture History (co-author), and On the Essence of Ancient Chinese Classics. He put forward and testified the "cultural ecology" theory and "cultural classics" theory, which have been fully recognized and frequently adopted by the academic circle. Besides, the dual theories are hailed as "important contribution" to the study on Chinese culture by senior scholars, for they are thought to demonstrate the charm of systematic history and represent a theoretic development of the study on the Chinese cultural history. During the past decade and more, Feng has mainly focused on the modern transformation of Chinese culture through exploring its own resources and the internal drivers, emphasizing the research on the key role of cultural interaction between China and western countries and paying greater attention to the conversion of concepts from ancient to modern times, and the correspondence of concepts between China and foreign countries during the process. His representative works are Deconstruction of Despotism -- the Study of Neo-People-centered Thought in the Late Ming Dynasty and the Beginning of Qing Dynasty(co-author),Practical Ideology in the Late Qing Dynasty(co-author),A Critical Biography on Zhang Zhidong,The Origins of New Expressions, and Theory of Feudalism, etc. He has won the 1^stPrize in the National Book Award, the 2^nd Prize in the National Humanities and Social Sciences Research Outstanding Achievement Award and the 1^stPrize in Hubei Social Sciences Research Outstanding Achievement Award. Many of his works have been translated into English, Japanese, Spanish and Korean for publication.