Professor Mayfair Yang received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, and has taught at U.C. Santa Barbara since 1987. She has also assumed teaching, research, and visiting scholar positions at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Beijing University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard University.
Yang is interested in issues of religion, secularization, and the state in modernity, especially in the tensions and traumas accompanying the break with traditional orders under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Her areas of research and teaching are: critical theory; gender and feminism; media studies; sovereignty and state power; and cultural approaches to political economy.
Yang's cultural and geographical region of specialization is China and China's offshoot cultures and diaspora in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West. Although her research is based on fieldwork in contemporary China and Taiwan, her approach is always informed by a vision of the longue duree in Chinese history, and she has published on ancient China.
For more information see
Professor Yang's webpage
