Yang Shen is a cultural anthropologist of religion and secularism. She received her PhD from Boston University in Anthropology in October 2019 and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany from 2019 to 2021. Yang’s research explores how Chinese conceptions of religion and secularity transform global projects of modernity. Her first book manuscript, Sidestepping Secularism: Ritual and Agency in more-than Buddhist China, examined how Buddhist temple spaces accommodate and transform popular religiosity in late socialist China.
Her current project, entitled Materializing Religious Mediation: Comparative Studies of the Social Efficacy of Lottery Divination, investigates the varying contexts of the availability of lottery divination and the changing ritual cultures in a digital time. Her publications include “Rethinking Traditions: Reading the Classics as Ritual. “Journal of Chinese Humanities 1 (2015) and, in Chinese, “Religion and Society in a Perspective of an Anthropology of Cultivation: Synopsis of the Second Workshop of Anthropology of Religion.” Studies of World Religions. vol6. (2016). 186-192.
Frieberg Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2021-2022