Adam Yuet Chau (PhD in Anthropology, 2001, Stanford University) is University Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Modern China in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow at St. John’s College. He is the author of Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press 2006) and editor of Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (Routledge 2011). He is currently working on projects investigating the rise of the ‘religion sphere‘ (zongjiaojie) in modern China; the idiom of hosting and forms of powerful writing (“text acts”) in Chinese political and religious culture.
Adam Chau was born in Beijing and grew up in Beijing and Hong Kong (hence the Anglicised Cantonese romanisation of my Chinese name). His undergraduate and graduate training in sociocultural anthropology was done in the US. His doctoral fieldwork was conducted in Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi Province) in the Yulin and Yan’an prefectures, on the cultural, social and political aspects of the revival of popular religion in rural China during the reform period. The results of that research have been published in a monograph (Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China; 2006, Stanford University Press) and a series of journal articles. After having lived in the US for more than a dozen years, Adam chau came to the UK in 2005, and has taught at Oxford and SOAS respectively before coming to Cambridge.