Stephen Field

Stephen L. Field is J. K. and Ingrid Lee Professor of Chinese at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is a specialist in pre-Qin Chinese literature (before 221 B.C.), and an authority on early Chinese cosmology as it pertains to the ancient art of fengshui.

Field earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985, and then joined the faculty of the College of William and Mary. He came to Trinity University in 1990 to create a new Chinese program. In the course of his academic career he has lived in and visited China many times, both as an exchange faculty and a participant in conferences. 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.

His best known works are Tian Wen: a Chinese Book of Origins (New Directions, 1985), a translation of a 4th century BC poem on Chinese cosmology, myth and legend, and “Cosmos, Cosmograph, and the Inquiring Poet: New Answers to the ‘Heaven Questions’,” a study of the same poem that appeared in Early China 17 (1992). On the subject of fengshui, he has delivered scholarly papers at international, national and regional conferences on its classical origins. He has also published an article entitled, “The Numerology of Nine Star Fengshui: A Hetu, Luoshu Resolution of the Mystery of Directional Auspice,” in Journal of Chinese Religion, no. 27 (1999), and a book chapter called, “In Search of Dragons: The Folk Ecology of Fengshui,” in N.J. Girardot, et al., Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape (Harvard, 2001). On the subject of ancient divination, he published the article, “Who Told the Fortunes? The Speaker in Early Chinese Divination Records” in Asia Major 13.2 (2000), and a book, Ancient Chinese Divination (Hawaii, 2008). The book begins by explaining how the art of divination evolved in Chinese society from the New Stone Age until the classical period. Then it shows how new forms of divination developed directly and indirectly out of the ancient traditions. Most recently he has completed a translation and annotation of the Zhouyi, titled The Yi of the Zhou Kingdom: The King Wen Book of Changes. 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.

Field lives with wife, Gail Reynolds, and his two dogs, on Sage Hill Farms in the Texas Hill Country near Austin.