Dr. Xiaofei Kang, Department of World Religions, The George Washington University, and author of Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda (Oxford, 2023), Winner of the 2025 Joseph Levenson Book Prize.
Professor Xiaofei Kang holds a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University (2000). She teaches courses on religions in East Asia, and her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014). Her recent book, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda (Oxford, 2023) examines the intertwined discourses of religion, gender and the Chinese Communist revolution.