Trained in social anthropology as well as in clinical psychology and religious studies, I have lived, studied, worked, done community service or conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Canada, France, the USA, Pakistan, Israel, West Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Taiwan and mainland China, where I lived for five years in Chengdu, Sichuan. I received my Ph.D. from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne, Paris) in 2002. Prior to joining HKU in 2008, I held appointments as the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and as a research fellow at the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (French School of Asian Studies), where I was the director of its Hong Kong centre, located at the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from 2004 to 2008.

After spending the past several years conducting ethnographic and socio-historical research on religious communities, spiritual movements and transformations of tradition in the modern Chinese world, I am now beginning to explore the broader implications of my findings for understanding the role of spiritual motivations and moral discourse in the emergence and evolution of social groups. Moving beyond the explicitly religious sphere, I have begun a new research project on the emergence of a culture of volunteering in China, uncovering the moral norms that orient volunteer behaviour and their connections with traditional and/or cosmopolitan values, and mapping the expansion of social spaces for volunteering in the sociopolitical context of the Peoples’ Republic of China.

Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007) was awarded the Francis L. K. Hsu Award for the Best Book in East Asian Anthropology. Three book manuscripts will be published in 2011: the textbook Chinese Religious Life: Culture, Society and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, co-edited with Philip Wickeri and Glenn Shive); The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, co-authored with Vincent Goossaert); and Daoism in the 20th Century: Between Eternity and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, co-edited with Xun Liu). I am currently working on a book entitled Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (co-authored with Elijah Siegler).

Volunteerism in Contemporary China: Moral Discourse and Social Spaces (Principal Investigator). General Research Fund, Hong Kong Research Grants Council, 2010-2013.

 Religious Movements in Modern China. Principal Investigator. Research grant of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, 2007-2009. Religion and Public Life in China. Co-Investigator (PI: Dr. Glenn Shive), Henry Luce Foundation grant, 2006-2010.

Professional and Community Service

Member of the Academic Board (Conseil scientifique), Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (2009-2012)

Series co-editor (with Richard Madsen and Kenneth Dean), Religion in Chinese Societies, Brill Academic Publishers (from 2009)

Editorial Board Member, Daoism: Religion, History and Society

Editorial Board Member, Journal of Daoist Studies

Executive Committee Member, Institute for Global Civilization (from 2007)

Community Advisor (Auxiliary Board Member) for the Bahá'í communities of Hong Kong and Macau (from 2007).

SOCI0052 Traditional Chinese Society
SOCI0061 Life Styles and Religious Practices
YSOC0006 Asian Heritages: Symbolism and Values
SOCI1003 Introduction to Anthropology
CCHU 9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change
Research Seminar for Postgraduate Students
SI2 Social Innovation Internship