Deane CurtinEmeriti

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During 2016-17 I will be in India on a Fulbright-Nehru Professional Excellence Fellowship. I will be based at Tibet House, New Delhi, conducting research on Buddhist practical ethics and the response to climate change. On November 26 I will be delivering the annual Spiritual Ecology address in Delhi, and on December 9 I will be offering a day-long workshop on Buddhism and climate change for the Department of Philosophy at Mumbai University.

I served as Professor in the Department of Philosophy from 1978 to 2015. At the time of retirement I was the Hanson-Peterson Chair of Liberal Studies. During 2012 - 2013 was on sabbatical in Dharamsala, India, where I coordinated a project with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives to translate the major works of Western philosophy into Tibetan for the first time. I'm also working on a book that examines what a moral life might look like if not ordered by the concepts of good and evil. These interests were supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

I have long been fascinated with the multiple ways people connect with place. My scholarship and teaching focus on international ethics, particularly the ethics of community development, and environmental ethics. These interests are reflected in two books: Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World (2005), and Chinnagounder's Challenge (1999)

Recent invitations to speak have taken me to Peru for the keynote address at the First International Congress for Sustainable Development at Cesar Vallejo University, to Tel Aviv University, where I spoke on ethics and population growth at the Inaugural Conference for the Tarnesby Chair in the College of Medicine, to Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India, and as the keynote speaker for the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium annual meeting.

Over the years, I have been a visiting professor at several universities around the world: Kansai Gaidai University in Japan, Kings College, Cambridge University, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Fiesole, Italy, and the Centre for Research on a New International Economic Order in Chennai, India.

At Gustavus, I have served as the Raymond and Florence Sponberg Chair of Ethics. I also designed and led the Community Development in India program. I'm a core faculty member in the Gustavus Environmental Studies Major.

I particularly enjoyed traveling with students, having led student programs in Japan, India, Spain, Italy and Morocco. At Gustavus, my courses included Philosophies of the Environment, Ethics of International Development, Philosophy of Art and Buddhist Philosophy. 

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