Biographical Sketch

Originally from Hong Kong, Joy is currently a sociology PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California. Her research areas are sociology of religion, sociology of culture, and religions in China. She came to USC in 2005 and since then she had been involved with different research projects that are religion-related, including the Transmission of Religion Across Generations project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. In 2008, she began her journey to investigate the recent revival of Confucianism in contemporary China. With the generous supports from the China-US Institute of USC and the John Templeton Foundation, she conducted dissertation fieldwork research in China during the summer of 2008, 2009 and 2010. She is currently working on her dissertation on the Classic-Reading Education Movement in contemporary China. The dissertation investigates how religion, tradition and modernity intersect with each other. Through looking at the Classic-Reading Education Movement (CREM), she analyzes the role of Confucianism in the religious landscapes in China, and the question on the social formation of religion in contemporary context.