
Stephen Lee Field, Ph.D.
- J.K. and Ingrid Lee Endowed Professor of Chinese Language & Literature , Modern Languages and Literatures
Stephen Field came to Trinity from the College of William & Mary in 1990 to found the Chinese program. Subsequently, in 1995, Trinity became the second of only two universities in Texas to boast a major in Chinese.
Raised on a farm in West Texas, Professor Field developed an early interest in nature, and then discovered nature poetry in college, where he majored in English romanticism. His study of Chinese in college was inspired by his reading of the Daoist philosopher, Lao Tzu. His dissertation was a study of the “field and garden” poets in ancient China, a branch of nature poetry akin to pastoral in the West. He is now a specialist in pre-Qin Chinese literature and an authority on early Chinese cosmology as it pertains to the ancient art of fengshui. His web site, FengshuiGate.com, gathers popular essays he has written on various aspects of fengshui as well as his translation of the earliest extant fengshui classic, the Zangshu, or Book of Burial.
He is active in the Association for Asian Studies, especially its regional arm, the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies, where he has served on the board of directors for many years.