Research Fellows

Andrew Stuart Abel holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His main area of research is the sociology religion, with a particular focus on Chinese Protestants. His article “Favor Fishing and Punch Bowl Christians: Ritual and Conversion in a Chinese Protestant Church” was published in 2006 in the Journal Sociology of Religion. Andrew is a China specialist with a degree in Chinese language and literature. He was a participating Editor of the Chinese Synonyms Usage Dictionary, now in its second edition. He has a long term interest in Chinese philosophy of the Warring States Period. As a research methodologist, Andrew has developed an existing auto-ethnographic research technique, “systematic self-observation,” into a method that can be paired with traditional survey research methods. Andrew is also a historical demographer, and has employed household records from the Japanese occupation of Taiwan to study uxorilocal marriage in urban Taipei.

Nanlia Cao holds a Bachelor degree in Sociology from Peking University, an MA in Sociology from Fordham University and a PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University. His research interests include the anthropology of contemporary China, everyday life, religion, Christian charity and transnational merchant communities. He has published articles on the Chinese Christian experience in Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, The China Journal, and China Perspectives. With a two-year grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, he is currently researching the business and religious lives of transnational Wenzhou Christian merchants in Paris in an attempt to reflect on broader issues regarding China’s post-reform political economy and global entrepreneurship.

André Laliberté has received his doctoral degree from the University of British Columbia in 1999 and is professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, where he teaches on the politics of Asia and comparative politics. He has published The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan, 1989-2003 (Routledge, 2004), and has co-edited with Marc Lanteigne the volume The Chinese Party-State at the Turn of the Millennium: Legitimacy and Adaptation (RoutledgeCurzon; 2007). He has written or co-written chapters on religion and philanthropy in China, the Buddhist charity Tzu Chi in Canada , relations between state and religion, religion and political change, and religion’s impact on identity, for multi-authored volumes, as well as articles in English, French, and Chinese for China Aktuell, Social Compass, la Revue internationale de politique comparée, Perspective chinoise, 民俗曲藝, St-Anthony’s International Review, and the European Journal of East Asian Studies, on state regulation of religion in Taiwan, Buddhist philanthropy in China, relations between states and religion in East Asia, the Tzu Chi Foundation in China and in Taiwan.

David A. Palmer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for Anthropological Research at the University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in the anthropology of Chinese religion from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne, Paris) in 2002. He was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a research fellow at the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (French School of Asian Studies), where he was the director of its Hong Kong centre. His book Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China was awarded the Francis L. K. Hsu Award for the Best Book in East Asian Anthropology. He is also the co-author or co-editor of three books to be published in 2010: Chinese Religious Life: Culture, Society and Politics; The Religious Question in Modern China, 1898-2008; and Daoism in the 20th Century: Between Eternity and Modernity. His current research interests include the transformations of Chinese religion in the modern and contemporary world, the globalization of Daoism, the Baha’i Faith in the Chinese world, and the emergence of a culture of volunteerism in contemporary China. He is currently a member of the Academic Council of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient and director of the Institute for Global Civilization.

Anna Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College. Her research interests include sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge. Sun has been studying the revival of Confucianism as a religion in contemporary China, as well as the larger conceptual issues of the classification of Chinese religions.

Joy Tong received her Ph.D. in sociology from National University of Singapore in 2009. Her thesis was about Christian ethics and economic life of overseas Chinese in mainland China. Her research interests include Christianity in Chinese societies, Islam in Southeast Asia, business ethics, overseas Chinese, and media. Her publications include “McDonaldization and the Mega-Church” in Religious Commodifications in Asia (Routledge, 2008; edited by Pattana Kitiarsa), and “Women, Piety and Practices,” Contemporary Islam, 2(1) March, 2008 (co-authored with Bryan Turner).

Carsten T. Vala received his Ph.D in political science from University of California, Berkeley. Currently he is an assistant professor at Loyola Unviersity Maryland. His research focus is Christianity in China. He is the author of Pathways to the Pulpit: Leadership Training in “Patriotic” and Unregistered Chinese Protestant Churches, a chapter in Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State, The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Yuting Wang received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame, IN, USA in May 2009. Her research mainly focuses on religion and immigrants in both the United States and China. She is especially interested in Muslims, both immigrant and indigenous, in these societies. In her dissertation, she studies the internal dynamics of a racially and ethnically diverse mosque and examines the intricate process of identity negotiation and construction among immigrant Muslims in the post-9.11 American society. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book and conducting research on the expatriate communities in the U.A.E., especially the young generation that was born and raised in this country as temporary residents.

JieXia Zhai Autry received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology, University of Texas-Austin, and a B.A. from Peking University. She has conducted research and taught courses on religion in China and Taiwan, on religion and social demography, on Asian immigrants in the U.S., and on Globalization and Chinese Diaspora. As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Jiexia Zhai Autry was recently awarded and is directing a large research grant funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Together with her collaborator, Dr. Jiexia Zhai Autry examines the spread and the impact of a Chinese indigenous Pentecostal and charismatic movement in East Asia. She has also helped and facilitated several large international conferences on empirical studies and dialogue on religion in China, and has been actively involved in East Asian intellectual communities. Dr. Jiexia Zhai Autry has published peer reviewed articles in both English and Chinese. Some of her recent publications include "Contrasting Trends of Religious Markets in Contemporary China and Taiwan" (Journal of Church and State, 2010) and "Buddhism in Asian America" (in Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, and Political History, forthcoming). She is also the lead author for "Religion and Educational Aspirations in Taiwan 1984-2004" (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2011), "Ethnic, Family, and Social Contextual Influences on Asian American Adolescents' Religiosity" (Sociological Spectrum, 2009). and "Parental Divorce and Religious Involvement among Young Adults" (Sociology of Religion, 2007).

Alice Wang earned an M.A. degree in English and American Literature from Fu-Jen University, Taiwan. She also received an M.A. degree in Comparative Literature, an M.A. degree in Art History, and earned her Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature all from Indiana University. She has been teaching Chinese language, literature, art, and culture at Purdue University since 1991.