The Religious Ecology of Confucius Temples in Contemporary China: An Empirical Investigation

Anna Sun from Kenyon College will speak on Confucius Temples at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.

Anna Sun's teaching and research interests include sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, social theory, and sociology of East Asia. In 2003-04 she was a Mellon Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London, and in 2005-06 she was a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow at Kenyon College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University in 2008.

As a co-principal investigator of the John Templeton Foundation funded research project "The Empirical Study of Religions in China" (ESRIC), 2006-2009, Sun has been studying the revival of Confucianism as a religion in contemporary China, as well as the larger conceptual and methodological issues in studying Asian religions.

In addition to her scholarly publications, Sun's work has also appeared in Harvard Review (2000) and The London Review of Books (2004). A MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2001, she is currently a Consulting Editor of The Kenyon Review. From 2006 to 2010, Professor Sun was the Faculty Advisor for the Kenyon sociology club and the Sociology Student Advisory Board (SSAB).

In 2010-11, she will be a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working on her book manuscript Confusions over Confucianism: Beyond the Secular and the Religious.