Anna Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College.
Anna Sun’s teaching and research interests include sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, sociology of culture, 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,” 2006-09, 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.
In 2010-11 Sun was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she was part of the "Secularisms" seminar and "Moralities" seminar. Her book, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities, is published by Princeton University Press in April 2013.
Besides scholarly publications, Sun has also published a collection of short stories in Chinese (The Blue Notebook, 2001). Her literary work in English has appeared in Harvard Review (2000), Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship (2000), and The London Review of Books (2004). A MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2001, she is currently a Consulting Editor of The Kenyon Review. Her latest essay is "The Diseased Language of Mo Yan" for The Kenyon Review. (For debates related to the essay, see Charles Laughlin's article and Perry Link's response.)
Education
Ph.D. Princeton University
M.A. Princeton University
B.A. UC BerkeleyBook
Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Current Research Interests
Revival of Confucianism in contemporary China; the classification of Chinese religions; prayer as spiritual exercise; religion and emotion; religion, politics, and secularism.
Selected Recent Conference Presentations
“The Revival of Confucian Rites in Contemporary China.”
The Neo-Confucianism Seminar, Columbia University, May 6, 2011.“The Religious Ecology of Confucius Temples.”
Symposium “Confucian Revival in Contemporary China: Preliminary Reports from the Field,” Center for Philosophy, University of Tokyo, Dec. 2-4, 2010.Invited Participant, “Consultation on Prayer and Prayerfulness.”
Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, November 20-21, 2009.“Situation, Action, and Agency: The Good Samaritan Experiment Revisited.”
Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, November 12-15, 2009.“The Revival of Confucianism as a Religion in Contemporary China.”
East Asian Studies, Denison University, September 8, 2009.“The Revival of Confucian Rituals in Contemporary China.”
Purdue University Symposium “Religion and Spirituality in China Today,” April 30-May 2, 2009.“Confusions over Confucians: Who Are the Confucians in East Asia?”
“East Asian Confucianism: Interactions and Innovations,” a conference jointly organized by Rutgers University and National Taiwan University, May 1-2, 2009.“The Cycle of Religious Controversies: The Logic of Evidence in the Settlement of Controversies over Confucianism, 1579-2008.”
Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, November 2008.Discussant, “Author Meets Critics: Eiko Ikegami’s Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture.”
Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, November 2008.“The Chinese Religious Repertoire: A New Approach to the Classification of Chinese Religions.”
Session on “The Nature and Components of Religion,” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2007.“Is Confucianism a Religion in China?: Intellectual Controversies and Ethnographic Notes.”
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November 2006.“How Confucianism Became a World Religion: Max Müller and the Birth of Comparative Studies of Religion.”
Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, April 2006.Courses Taught at Kenyon
SOCY 103 Introduction to Sociology: Society and Culture
SOCY 221 Sociology of Religion: Global Religions in Modern Society
SOCY 249 Knowledge of the Other: Journey to the East
SOCY 361 Classical Social Theory
SOCY 450 French Social Theory
SOCY 465 Sociology of Knowledge
ASIA 490 Public Intellectuals in Comparative PerspectiveContact Information
Prof. Anna Sun
Department of Sociology
Kenyon College
Gambier
OH 43022Email: suna@kenyon.edu
February 2013
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