Barry L. Gan is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and was for many years the Director of the Center for Nonviolence at St. Bonaventure University. He is the author of Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction. He is also co-editor with Robert L. Holmes of a leading anthology on nonviolence, Nonviolence in Theory and Practice, now in a third edition; and for twenty-five years he was editor of The Acorn: Journal of the Gandhi-King Society. For two years he served as program committee chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest and largest interfaith peace group in the United States, and also served for three years as co-editor of Peace and Change, a quarterly journal of peace research.

 

After receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from the University of Rochester in 1981 and 1984, respectively, he taught at St. Bonaventure University for thirty-six years before retiring in 2021. Prior to that he taught high school and junior high school English for six years.

 

He has played in several musical groups performing on guitar and singing lead vocals and harmony. Currently he plays with a regional rock ‘n’ roll cover band–not Norman–and an acoustic duo–Time Travelers.

 

He is married to Miaoli Zhang, a former trainer in microscopic photography for Olympus of China. He has a daughter who is a writer and part-time professor; a son who is a writer and works in the field of website development and search engine optimization; and a stepson who is a guitar player and does freelance writing.

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