Xiaobo Yuan
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religion
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Maxey Hall 321
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509-527-5958
As an anthropologist of religion, Professor Yuan explores the contemporary development of Protestant Christianity in mainland China, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of urban communities of worshippers and their entanglements with national and local state, economic, and cultural forces. In her research, she is interested in how religious communities produce and sustain visions of flourishing, futurity, and social transformation. Bridging the Anthropology and Religion departments at Whitman, Professor Yuan’s courses span a number of areas—from survey courses on global Christianity and contemporary China, to seminars on affect and emotion, food and religion, and religion and capitalism—that allow students to explore the intersections between religion, everyday life, and global structures of power and resistance. Prior to coming to Whitman, professor Yuan taught at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, and earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Ph.D. Anthropology
University of Chicago
2017
M.A. Anthropology
University of Chicago
2011
B.A. Anthropology and English
Johns Hopkins University
2007
Dr. Yuan researches the contemporary development of Protestant Christianity in mainland China and the wider Sinosphere. Her current book manuscript, Converting China: Urban Christianity and the Politics of Futurity, examines how Chinese Christians envision religious flourishing and futurity amidst a Protestant boom in urban China. Her other research interests include transnational connections between Chinese missionaries and U.S.-based evangelical organizations; the emergence of "techno-missionaries" among evangelical "hackers"; and the broader influence of Chinese missions in Southeast Asia and the broader Sinophone world.
2024 Review essay, Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere, ed. By Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau (Duke University Press, 2022), in The Comparatist.
2023 (co-authored w/ Shiqi Lin) “Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China: Towards Plural Horizons of Political Imagination,” Introduction to China Perspectives 135 (2023): 3-7. https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.16204
2021 “Infernal Affect: Christianity, Class, and Economic Anxiety in Urban China.” Roundtable on Lived Neoliberalism: Negotiating Markets and Morality Outside the West, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (3): 956-977. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab077
2021 “Refusing Educational Desire: Negotiating Faith and Precarity at an Underground Chinese Christian School.” Asian Anthropology 20(3): 190-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2021.1930468
2021 “Gendering Heterodoxy: The Corporeal Politics of Xiejiao in Chinese Christianity.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 174–203. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaa0692