Mayfair YANG

Mayfair Yang

Director of Asian Studies, University of Sydney

Mayfair Yang is the Director of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. She has also taught in the Departments of Anthropology, Religious Studies, and East Asian Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara between 1987 and June 2007. Dr. Yang is interested in issues of religion, secularization, and the state in modernity, especially in the tensions and traumas accompanying the break with traditional orders under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Her areas of research and teaching are: critical theory; gender and feminism; media studies; sovereignty and state power; and cultural approaches to political economy. Dr. Yang's cultural and geographical region of specialization is China and China's offshoot cultures and diaspora in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West. Although her research is based on fieldwork in contemporary China and Taiwan, her approach is always informed by a vision of the longue duree in Chinese history, and she has published on ancient China. She has published many articles and book chapters. Most recently, she edited Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (forthcoming, University of California Press, 2008).