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Biography

James MillerI was born in England, in 1968, and completed a B.A. (Hons.) in Chinese Studies at Durham University, with a distinction in oral Chinese. As part of my language studies, I spent a year at Renmin University of China, in Bejing, and a summer on a scholarship at the Mandarin Training Center at Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. After my BA, I spent three years at Cambridge University studying theology and religious studies at the Faculty of Divinity. After graduating with an MA, I came to Boston, where I embarked upon a Ph.D. in the Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. I studied with Livia Kohn, one of the West’s leading experts on Daoism (aka Taoism), the organized indigenous religion of China, and also John Berthrong, Robert Neville and Tu Weiming (at Harvard), who were three of the great scholars of Confucian philosophy working in North America at that time.

From 2000 to 2018, I lived in Toronto and worked at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where I held a number of positions in the School of Religion, the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Cultural Studies. In 2007-2008 and 2015 I spent sabbaticals as a visiting research professor in the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

My research has focused mainly on traditional Chinese views of nature and environment, and I’ve published six books related to this topic.