Yanfei Sun

Yanfei Sun is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her fields of interest include the sociology of religion and political sociology. Her research examines religious change, religious movements, religious toleration, secularism, and religious nationalism. Her recent work has expanded to the historical-comparative study of empires and nation-states.

Her book, Religious Change in Post-Mao China: Toward a New Sociology of Religion, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Her research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Modern China, and Social Compass, as well as leading Chinese sociological journals and many edited volumes. Her 2017 article in the American Journal of Sociology and her 2019 article in Theory and Society received the Distinguished Article Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 2018 and 2020, respectively.

Sun received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2010. She was a Mellon Research Fellow at the Columbia University Society of Fellows from 2010 to 2013, a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 2023 to 2024, and a Fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg in Fall 2024. Before joining the University of Virginia, she taught at Zhejiang University.