Dr. Adam Yuet Chau

Adam Chau was born in Beijing and grew up in Beijing and Hong Kong. His undergraduate and graduate training in sociocultural anthropology was done in the US. His doctoral fieldwork (PhD in Anthropology, Stanford University, 2001) 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, he came to the UK in 2005, and has taught at Oxford and SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) respectively before coming to Cambridge.

His research interests focus on Social and cultural transformations in contemporary China; Chinese religions, especially their social aspects; hosting as an idiom of social practice in Chinese religion and politics; forms of powerful writing; the Indonesian Chinese returnees (yin’ni guiqiao 印尼归侨) in China and Hong Kong.