Matthew Duperon

MA, Cornell University

BA, College of William and Mary

PHD, Brown University

What makes the best kind of human life? This question fuels my work and my personal life. It is a question of interest to both college students and the world’s most brilliant and influential thinkers. What began as a hunch that I could better understand the answer by studying classical Chinese religious thought led me to learn Mandarin and classical Chinese, to study abroad at Tsinghua University in Beijing and National Taiwan University in Taipei, and to earn a Ph.D. in religious studies at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Living my best life as a religious studies professor at Susquehanna centers on teaching and writing about comparative ethics. In upper-level ethics classes like Daoism, Zen, and Authenticity and Confucian Ethics, I get to share challenging, intriguing ideas about human flourishing with students, and we explore together how we can use these ideas to better all of our lives.

Meanwhile, I’m still learning how I want to live, influenced by my career and my relationships with those inside and outside the SU community. Living in Selinsgrove means I can see my neighbors and experience the seasons on my daily bike ride to work, and I can come home at the end of the day to the house where four of my five children were born (one of whom I delivered myself!). My wife and I can learn to live more sustainably here, getting much of our food from our friends and neighbors, eating seasonally, and learning how to raise a family.