Yi-Fu Tuan

Tuan was an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He occasionally gave lectures, continued to write his "Dear Colleague" letters and to publish new books on geosophy. His most recent books are Human Goodness (2008) and Religion: From Place to Placelessness (2010). He resided in Madison, Wisconsin.

After 14 years at the University of Minnesota, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin and continued his professional career at University of Wisconsin–Madison as the J.K. Wright and Vilas Professor of Geography (1985–1998). He 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. Tuan was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1987 and the Vautrin Lud Prize in 2012.

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. He became a full professor at the University of Minnesota in 1968. In the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was while he was at Minnesota that he became known for his work in humanistic geography, but his forays into this approach began earlier with an article on topophilia that appeared in the journal Landscape. In a 2004 "Dear Colleague" letter he described the difference between human geography and humanistic geography:

Yi-Fu Tuan (Chinese: 段義孚; December 5, 1930 – August 10, 2022) was a Chinese-born American geographer. He was one of the key figures in human geography and arguably the most important originator of humanistic geography.

Born in 1930 in Tianjin, China to an upper-class family, he was educated in China, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. He attended University College London, but 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.