About:

China’s Religious Landscape: Models of Religious Pluralism

Dr. David A. Palmer is an Associate Professor in the department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, and Honourary Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Trained at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, he was formerly the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (French School of Asian Studies), located at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of the award-winning Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007), co-author of The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies), and co-editor of Chinese Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has published several articles, journal issues and edited volumes on Chinese religion, modern Daoism, the Baha’i Faith, and modern religious movements. His current research projects focus on local ritual traditions, transnational religious movements, and on faith-based volunteering and NGOs in the Chinese world and Southeast Asia.

Speaker:

DR. DAVID A. PALMER

Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Hong Kong