Religion

Professor Zhou is an Associate Professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of World Religions. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Shandong University. She has done extensive research on Buddhism and political culture in Ming Dynasty China.

Liu Jingyu graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with her MPhil degree in Chinese Studies in July 2011 and currently is a first-year student in the Regional Studies-East Asia program. Her research interests are Chinese popular religion and Daoism during the Song-Yuan-Ming transition. She introduced in her master thesis a Daoist warrior god called Wen Qiong who was usually worshipped and invoked as Marshal Wen during rituals. Through hagiographic studies, she pointed out that Marshal Wen, who was heavily imbedded with the Daoist weltanschauung, was part of the negotiation for a rapprochement between local religion and Daoism.

Dr. C. Julia Huang is Professor of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. She had been a junior fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, a senior fellow at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, an affiliated scholar at the International Institute for Asia Studies in the Netherlands, and a visiting senior research fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include religion, culture, and globalization. She has conducted fieldwork on religion in Taiwan and among the Chinese in Malaysia and the United States, and on transnational marriage in southern Vietnam.

Huang has published 19 articles in edited volumes and refereed journals, including Journal of Asian Studies, Ethnology, Nova Religio, and positions. Her book, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009), examines the development and organization of a transnational Buddhist non-governmental organization (NGO) that originated in Taiwan. She is currently working on ethnography of engaged religions among the Chinese in Malacca, Malaysia.

Kimura Toshiaki is an Associate Professor of the Department of Religious Studies at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.  He got his M.A. and Ph.D. from Tohoku University.  His research has been focused on Indonesian society and religion, and has conducted his field work in Medan, capital city of North Sumatra province since 1995.  While at the Harvard-Yenching Institute as a visiting scholar, he conducted a research project entitled "Religion, Identity and the Image of the others in a Southeast Asian Metropolitan City."

An Deming is a Professor and Senior Researcher of Folklore at Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  He got his Ph.D. from Beijing Normal University in 1997.  His research interests are focused on popular religion (folk beliefs) among Han Chinese in northwest China, Chinese proverbs, and intellectual history of Chinese Folklore Studies.  Since 1992, he has been conducting fieldwork on popular religion--especially beliefs and rituals held to avert natural disasters in farming villages, proverbs, and folk narratives in his hometown Tianshui, Gansu Province.  In addition to ethnographic achievement acquired, the experiences of doing fieldwork at hometown also inspired his latest concern on the major trend lasting throughout the history of Chinese folklore studies: studying folklore at hometown.  At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he worked on a project on transformation and reconstruction of popular religion in a changing village in the Tianshui area.  This project attempts to probe into the interrelationship between popular religion and the dramatic social changes in contemporary northwest China.

Current Research Projects and Interests: Working on the Christian Churches' history in China, Confucianism as a religion, and folk religions in China.  Interested in religious studies, communication and dialogues between cultures.