Contributors
Friederike Assandri
is currently a researcher at Leipzig University, Germany. She is interested in the history of Daoism and the interaction of Daoism and Buddhism in early medieval China. In this context she works on questions pertaining to the fields of philosophy and religion. She has published widely, including the monographs The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying: Daoism, Buddhism, and the Laozi in the Tang Dynasty (Oxford University Press, 2021), Dispute zwischen Daoisten und Buddhisten im Fo Dao lunheng des Daoxuan (596–667) (Ostasien Verlag, 2015), Beyond the Daode jing: Tang Dynasty Daoist Philosophy (Three Pines Press, 2009).
Nikolas Broy
is Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of Religion at Leipzig University. His research focuses on the social history of religion in Chinese societies, particularly popular religious sects, Buddhism, and vegetarian practices, but he also works on the globalization of Chinese religions and sociological approaches to understanding religion. His most recent publications include “Global Dao: The Making of Transnational Yiguandao” (2020), “The Filial Sectarian: Confucian Values and Popular Sects in Late Imperial China and Modern Taiwan” (2020), and “Moral Integration or Social Segregation? Vegetarianism and Vegetarian Religious Communities in Chinese Religious Life” (2019).
Adam Yuet Chau
is Professor of the Anthropology of China at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Religion in China: Ties That Bind (Polity, 2019), editor of Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (Routledge, 2011), and co-editor of a 2019 special issue of L’Homme (Cumulus: Hoarding, Hosting and Hospitality). Currently editing Chinese Religious Culture in 100 Objects (group project), he is also working on book projects on hosting (
Philip Clart
is Professor of Chinese Culture and History at Leipzig University, Germany, and editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions. His main research areas are popular religion and new religious movements in Taiwan, as well as literature and religions of the late imperial period. His monographs include Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal (University of Washington Press, 2007) and Die Religionen Chinas (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). He has edited or co-edited several volumes, including most recently Text and Context in the Modern History of Chinese Religions: Redemptive Societies and Their Sacred Texts (Brill, 2020).
Max Deeg
is Professor in Buddhist Studies at Cardiff University, UK. He holds a PhD in Classical Indology and a professorial degree (Habilitation) in Religious Studies. His main research interests are the history and spread of Buddhism from India to Central Asia and China. Among his publications are a German translation of the Lotus Sutra (2007), a (German) translation of the travelogue of the Chinese monk Faxian (2005), and an annotated translation of the Chinese Christian stele-inscription of Xi’an (2018). At the moment, he is preparing an annotated English translation of Xuanzang’s travelogue (Datang Xiyu ji).
Thomas Fröhlich
is Professor of Sinology at the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on modern Chinese philosophy, political thought, and intellectual history. He has authored the monographs Tang Junyi: Confucian Philosophy and the Challenge of Modernity (Brill, 2017) and Staatsdenken im China der Republikzeit (1912–1949) (Campus, 2000). His edited volumes include, among others, Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 (with Axel Schneider; Brill, 2020) and Taiwans unvergänglicher Antikolonialismus: Jiang Weishui und der Widerstand gegen die japanische Kolonialherrschaft (with Liu Yishan; Transcript, 2011). He is the editor, together with Kai Vogelsang, of the journal Oriens Extremus.
Joachim Gentz
is Chair of Chinese Philosophy and Religion at the University of Edinburgh; his research field is Chinese intellectual history with a focus on early history of thought. He has published on early Confucian commentarial traditions, Chinese ritual and divination, Chinese interreligious discourses, early Chinese forms of argumentation, Chinese visual traditions, modern Chinese religious policy, and Cultural Studies theory in both German and English. His English publications include Keywords Re-Oriented (Dunedin Academic Press, 2009), Understanding Chinese Religions (Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2012), Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, ed. with P. Schmidt- Leukel), Literary Forms of Argument in Early China, (Brill, 2015, 2016, ed. with D. Meyer), China and the World, the World and China: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Wagner (Ostasien Verlag, 2019, 4 vols., ed. with B. Mittler, N. Gentz and C. Yeh).
Vincent Goossaert
(PhD, EPHE, Paris, 1997) was a research fellow at CNRS (1998–2012) and is now Professor of Daoism and Chinese religions at EPHE, PSL; he has served as dean of its graduate school (2014–2018). His research deals with the social history of Chinese religion in late imperial and modern times. He is co-editor of T’oung Pao, a leading journal in sinology established in 1890. Recent publications include Making the Gods Speak: The Ritual Production of Revelation in Chinese History (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), Heavenly Masters: Two Thousand Years of the Daoist State (University of Hawai‘i Press & Chinese University Press, 2021); Vies des saints exorcistes: Hagiographies taoïstes, 11e–16e siècles (Les Belles Lettres, 2021); The Fifty Years that Changed Chinese Religion, 1898–1948, with Paul R. Katz (AAS, 2021) and Daoism in Modern China: Clerics and Temples in Urban Transformations, 1860–Present, Vincent Goossaert & Liu Xun (eds.) (Routledge, 2021).
Esther-Maria Guggenmos
is Professor for the History of Religions at Lund University. Educated in Religious Studies and Sinology in Münster, Bonn, and Taipeh, she concentrated on urban lay Buddhism in Taiwan (PhD Ghent University, 2010). She was research coordinator of the IKGF, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, and held positions as visiting professor in Münster, Erlangen, and Fribourg. In her habilitation, she analyzed the relation between Chinese Buddhism and divinatory practices. Guggenmos specializes in Chinese Buddhism, aesthetics of religion, and processes of cultural exchange. Together with LI Wei, she is author of a selected translation of the Biographies of Thaumaturge Monks (Wahrsagende Mönche im chinesischen Buddhismus, Ostasien Verlag, 2019), on the basis of which she reflects in her article on how xin can be seen as a narrative marker intended to convince the readers of the power of Buddhism. Other monographs: Im Netz des Indra (with Annette Wilke, LIT Verlag, 2008), and I Believe in Buddhism and Travelling (Ergon, 2017).
Huang Weishan
is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the Hong Kong Shue Yan University. Dr. Huang received her PhD degree in Sociology at the New School University and was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Religious and Ethnic Diversities. Her research interests are the sociology of religion, transnational sociology, and urban sociology. One of her research projects was to investigate how cultural and economic forces intertwined in urban re-structuring in New York and Shanghai, based on urban ethnography and census data. Her current research is to investigate the expansion of Chinese Buddhism in the Western cities.
Thomas Jansen
is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. He has published Höfische Öffentlichkeit im frühmittelalterlichen China: Debatten im Salon des Prinzen Xiao Ziliang (Rombach, 2000) and several articles on early medieval China. He co-edited Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China Transnational Religions, Local Agents, and the Study of Religion, 1800–Present (Brill, 2014). His current project is entitled Religious Text Production in Late Imperial China: Social, Religious, and Performative Aspects of Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the 16th to 19th centuries and will explore the manifold interactions between religious texts and their users.
Jiang Manke
is presently a guest researcher at the Institute for Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research focuses on theology and philosophy of religion in the Late Enlightenment and early German Romanticism, especially Friedrich Schleiermacher, and on the theory of religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a scholar with Chinese background she is also interested in the reception of Chinese religions in the European philosophy and theology as well as the history of Christianity in China. Her most recent publication is the monograph Religion und Individualität bei Schleiermacher (De Gruyter, 2020).
Thoralf Klein
is Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Global History at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on modern China and its interactions with the wider world, including the history of Christian missions and political religions. His monographs include Die Basler Mission in Guangdong (Südchina) 1859–1931 (Iudicium, 2002) and Geschichte des modernen China (2nd ed. Schöningh, 2009). He has edited or co-edited several volumes, including Globalisation and the Making of Religious Modernity in China (Brill, 2014) and The Boxer War: Media and Memory of an Imperialist Intervention (Solivagus, 2020).
Christoph Kleine
is Professor for the History of Religion at Leipzig University, Germany and co-editor in chief of the Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft. His main research areas are the religious history of Japan and East Asian Buddhism, especially Pure Land Buddhism in Japan. His monographs include Der Buddhismus in Japan (Mohr Siebeck, 2011), Der Buddhismus des Reinen Landes (Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2015), and (in collaboration with Oliver Freiberger) Buddhismus (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). He has edited or co-edited several volumes, including most recently Religionsbegegnung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019) and Secularities in Japan (Brill, 2019).
Hans Martin Krämer
is Professor of Japanese Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany. He has published on the cultural, social, and political history of early modern and modern Japan. His latest publications have focused on conceptual problems of the relationship between state and religion in modern Japan and include the monograph Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015) as well as the two co-edited volumes Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement (SUNY Press, 2020) and Buddhism and Modernity: Sources from Nineteenth-Century Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021).
Johanna Lüdde
is a researcher on Buddhism and Christianity in Germany and Mainland China, where she worked as a lecturer at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an from 2011 to 2015. Before her maternity leave in 2020, she was a research fellow in the Chinese Department of Freie University Berlin from 2016 to 2019, where she conducted a research project on Chinese Buddhist nuns in the PRC. Her first monograph was her PhD thesis on Chinese students in Germany converting to Protestant Christianity (“Die Funktionen der Konversion chinesischer Studierender in Deutschland zum Christentum protestantischer Prägung am Beispiel einer chinesischen christlichen Gemeinde in einer deutschen Großstadt”).
Barbara Meisterernst
is presently Professor in the Linguistics Institute of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Her special research area is the study of the diachronic grammar of Chinese with particular respect to aspect and modality. Additionally, she is interested in Silk Road studies. She authored two monographs on the diachronic grammar of Chinese, the most recent is Tense and Aspect in Han Period Chinese: A Linguistic Study of the Shǐjì (De Gruyter, 2015). She edited and co-edited several volumes, including a work on Silk Road Studies (Routledge, 2016), and two collections of articles on pre-Modern Chinese Grammar (Harrassowitz, 2016; Springer, 2019).
Christian Meyer
is Professor for Culture and History of China with a Focus on Religions at Freie Universität Berlin. He has been a visiting fellow at various institutions such as the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Academia Sinica (Taipei), and the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies (Hong Kong). His research focuses on discourses on religion in modern China, Confucianism, and Christianity in China. He authored the book Ritendiskussionen am Hof der nördlichen Song-Dynastie (1034–1093) (Steyler, 2008) and co-edited together with Thomas Jansen and Thoralf Klein the volume Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China: Transnational Religions, Local Agents, and the Study of Religion, 1800-Present (Brill, 2014).
Nicolas Standaert
PhD (1984), Leiden University, is Professor of Sinology at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has published widely on Sino-European cultural contacts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His recent monographs include The Chinese Gazette in European Sources: Joining the Global Public in the Early and Mid-Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2022), The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts: Chinese and European Stories about Emperor Ku and His Concubines (Brill, 2016), and Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012).
Chloë Starr
is Professor of Asian Christianity and Theology at Yale Divinity School. She works on Chinese theology and literature. Monographs include Chinese Theology: Text and Context (Yale University Press, 2016) and Red-light Novels of the Late Qing (Brill, 2007). She is currently editing a three-volume series on modern Chinese theologies and is about to publish an English-language Reader in Chinese Theology (Baylor University Press).
Tam Wai Lun
is a Professor of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD on Chinese Buddhism from the McMaster University. He received multiple competitive research grants from the University Grant Committee of the Hong Kong government and from the Taiwan Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation to conduct fieldwork research in southeast China. The findings were published in the form of ethnographical essays collected in the 30 volumes of the Traditional Hakka Society series edited by John Lagerwey.
Stefania Travagnin
is Lecturer in Chinese Buddhism at SOAS, UK. Her research areas are Buddhism in Republican and Contemporary China, and the history of Taiwanese Buddhism. She is currently co-directing the multi-year research project “Mapping Religious Diversity in Modern Sichuan,” funded by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation; within this project she is analyzing local Buddhist networks, with focus on nuns’ communities and systems of education. She has edited or co-edited a few volumes, including Religion and Media in China: Insights and Case Studies from the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (Routledge, 2016) and the three-volume publication Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions (De Gruyter, 2019–2020). She is also co-editor of the journal Contemporary Buddhism.
Dror Weil
received his PhD from Princeton University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. His research interests focus on textual exchanges between the Islamicate world and China and the socio-intellectual history of China’s Muslims during the late medieval and early modern periods. Weil’s publications include: the co-edited book Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (Routledge, 2022); “Islamicated China—China’s Participation in the Islamicate Book Culture During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 4/1–2 (2016); and “Unveiling Nature: Liu Zhi’s Translation of Arabo-Persian Physiology in Early Modern China,” Osiris 38 (2022).
Gerda Wielander
is Professor in Chinese Studies and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Westminster, London. Her research interest lies in the link of the personal and spiritual to wider social and political developments in modern and contemporary China. She is the author of Christian Values in Communist China (Routledge, 2013), as well as several book chapters and articles in leading peer-reviewed journals. Her most recent work includes a volume on Chinese Discourses on Happiness (Hong Kong University Press, 2018) and Cultural China 2020 (University of Westminster Press, 2021). Gerda Wielander is the director of the Contemporary China Centre at the University of Westminster and editor of the British Journal of Chinese Studies.