For someone with a gentle manner, Anna Xiao Dong Sun has undertaken some tough challenges. As a teenager in Beijing, she joined the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. As a young fiction writer, she rejected contemporary Chinese trends by aiming for a delicate lyricism. And as a sociologist, she studies religion in the People's Republic, where the very topic is politically sensitive.

Sun, who joined Kenyon's faculty in 2005, is collaborating with other scholars in an ambitious new study of religious practice in China. It's a tricky task. In a country where attitudes have been colored by communist ideology and tight government control, most people will say they don't belong to any religious denomination. But a little probing, says Sun, reveals "a deep reservoir" of practices, ranging from ancestor worship to belief in the soul. Unlike the West, she points out, religious boundaries are fluid: people may pick and choose rituals from Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and folk religions, as if from a cultural "tool kit."

Sun, who teaches a range of courses in the sociology department, also approaches her teaching in the spirit of probing beneath the surface. In her course "Knowledge of the Other: Journey to the East," for example, her students dissect Western concepts of the Orient, moving from historical and theoretical readings to specific "cases," such as the images of Japan in novels like Silk and films like Lost in Translation.

She started writing fiction during summer vacations as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. Too much modern Chinese writing, even dissident work, she feels, is "resolutely pedestrian" in style. "The Chinese language is a long river," says Sun. "I want to draw attention to the sheer beauty of Chinese."

Her story collection, The Blue Notebook, was nominated for a national award in China. By the time she was in graduate school at Princeton, Sun was writing in English and winning prestigious fellowships. She remains passionately interested in the arts, although most of her energies now go into teaching and research in sociology.

Meanwhile, the spirit of Tiananmen Square remains a touchstone. "I was marching with literally millions of other people," she says. "We felt like we were part of history. That's why we were so fearless."