Time: 2:00 PM-3:30 PM, Friday February 6

Location: AB1079

Speaker: Dr. Yanfei Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University

Abstract

This talk presents insights from my newly published book that synthesizes two decades of ethnographic, archival, and historical-comparative research on religious transformation in China in the long 20th century. The talk will introduce an “institutions-in-context” theory that not only allows me to explain religious change in the case of China, but has the potential to be used to understand the growth dynamics of religions across the globe.

Bio

Yanfei Sun is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2010. She was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows (2010–2013), a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2023–2024), a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard University, and a Lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie in the sociology of religion and political sociology, with a focus on religious change, religious movements, religious toleration, secularism, and religious nationalism. Her recent work has extended to historical-comparative studies of empires and nation-states. Her scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Modern China, and Social Compass, as well as leading Chinese sociology journals including Sociological Studies and the Sociological Review of China, along with many edited volumes. Her articles received the Distinguished Article Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 2018 and 2020 respectively. Her book, Religious Change in Post-Mao China: Toward a New Sociology of Religion, is published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026.