Anna Sun's teaching and research interests include sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, social theory, and sociology of East Asia. In 2003-04 she was a Mellon Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London, and in 2005-06 she was a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow at Kenyon College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University in 2008.

As a co-principal investigator of the John Templeton Foundation funded research project "The Empirical Study of Religions in China" (ESRIC), 2006-2009, Sun has been studying the revival of Confucianism as a religion in contemporary China, as well as the larger conceptual and methodological issues in studying Asian religions.

In addition to her scholarly publications, Sun's work has also appeared in Harvard Review (2000) and The London Review of Books (2004). A MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2001, she is currently a Consulting Editor of The Kenyon Review. From 2006 to 2010, Professor Sun was the Faculty Advisor for the Kenyon sociology club and the Sociology Student Advisory Board (SSAB).

In 2010-11, she was a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working on her book manuscript Confusions over Confucianism: Beyond the Secular and the Religious.

Areas of Expertise

Sociology of religion, sociology of culture, contemporary revival of Confucianism

Education

Ph.D. Princeton University
M.A. Princeton University
B.A. UC Berkeley

Selected Publications

"To Become a Confucian." Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

"Counting Confucians: Who Are the Confucians in Contemporary East Asia?" Newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences of National Taiwan University, 2009.

"The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes." State, Market and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney, Brill, 2005.

Courses Taught

SOCY 103 Introduction to Sociology: Society and Culture
SOCY 221 Sociology of Religion: Global Religions in Modern Society
SOCY 249 Knowledge of the Other: Journey to the East
SOCY 361 Classical Social Theory
SOCY 450 French Social Theory
SOCY 465 Sociology of Knowledge
ASIA 490 Asian Studies Senior Seminar: Public Intellectuals in Comparative Perspective