Wang, Huayan

2018–2019 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Inalco


Huayan (Cécile) WANG is Postdoctoral research fellow of 2018–2019 on history of Buddhism at the Centre d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires sur le Bouddhisme (CEIB) of the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. She received her Ph.D. in history from the École des hautes études en sciences socials (Paris) in 2015. Her main study area is history and anthropology of Chinese religions, especially their social and political role in local societies. Her recent publications include “Le bouddhisme Azhali du peuple Bai: une tradition bouddhiste locale au sud-ouest de la Chine”, in Archives de sciences sociales des religions, numéro spécial “China-Inde”, 2020, forthcoming;  “To know how to predict, to translate, and to write: the division of religious work in the rebulding of a temple in Changzhi (Shanxi) today”, with Guillaume Dutournier, Routledge, London, 2019, forthcoming; “The Revival of the Cult of Cui Fujun in Shanxi and Hebei”, in Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore, 195 (2017.3): 79–140; “Cui Fujun : un protecteur des empereurs du Xème au XIIème siècle ?”. Études chinoises, Vol. XXXI-1 (2012), p. 49–65. For more information visit: http://ceib.nhvvs.fr/wang-huayan/.

During her Postdoctoral fellowship, she assisted professor Vincent Goossaert in preparing the Chinese Religious Text Authority database project (CRTA) which has made encouraging progress. Some pilot committee members held a meeting at Paris in November 2018 to decide the outline of the project. For the first phase of the project, 4,000 volumes of religious books have been selected to be input in the database; each time contains seventeen entries. An informatics technician based at the EPHE is employed to build the database system. The project has also contacted more than thirty scholars on Chinese religions in the world and half of them have accepted to participate in the project. As part of the project, a workshop aiming to train young scholars in reading Chinese religious texts will be held at Aussois in France in December 2019. The project hope this training will be regular, such as once a year.

She also helped organize the International and Intensive Program on Buddhism and East Asian Cultures at Inalco in Paris at July 6–24. This year, the program, supported by the Tianzhu Global Network of Buddhist Studies, had united forty students and twenty professors for four intensive courses, a workshop and a young scholars’ forum. She herself participated in “the 2nd International Workshop on Religions in Modern China”.

She was also invited by the Ghent University to give a lecture on “Frontier, Ethnicity and Religion: the Azhali Buddhist tradition of the Bai people in South-western China” in the “Permanent Training Lecture Series” on “Buddhist Traditions of East Asia” in April 24 2019.