Rate My Professor Yifeng Xie

Professor Yifeng Xie serves as Professor and Director of the History Department at Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, where he also holds the position of Doctoral Supervisor. A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, he earned his Bachelor of History from Sichuan University (2006-2010), Master of History from Zhejiang University, School of Humanities (2010-2012, supervised by Associate Professor Wu Zhengqiang), and PhD from Fudan University's Institute of Literature and History (2012-2017, supervised by Professor Ge Zhaoguang), with a focus on Asian Religions, Art, and History. His doctoral dissertation, titled "Continuity in Transformation: The Relationship between Daoism, Politics, Society, and Culture in the Two Song Dynasties," was awarded Fudan University's Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in 2020. Xie joined Yuelu Academy in June 2017. He was selected as the sole mainland Chinese doctoral student for the Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Fellowship (August 2014-January 2016), conducting research at Harvard's Yenching Institute and Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations under cooperating supervisor Professor James Robson. Additionally, he served as a fully funded Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Department of History of Art and Architecture (September 2019-August 2020, invited by Professor Eugene Wang) and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard's Chinese Art Media Lab since 2021 for a two-year term.

Xie's research specializes in Tang-Song history, Chinese intellectual history, religion, and art. He has published over 40 papers in CSSCI journals and collections since 2015, with four reprinted in full by Renmin University of China Abstracts and four featured on the Philosophy and Social Sciences Main Literature Platform. His works appear in prestigious outlets including Shilin, Dushu, Twenty-First Century, and Daoist Studies Journal, alongside English publications such as reviews in Frontiers of History in China and articles in Religions, notably "Struggle on the Axis: The Advance and Retreat of Buddhist Statues in Medieval Chang'an" (2021) and "From Pagoda to Pavilion: The Transition of Spatial Logic in Liao Dynasty Pagodas" (2024). Xie co-translated Stephen R. Bokenkamp's Daoist Studies Collection (Zhongxi Book Company, 2015) and contributed to the collation and annotation of Gangjian Yizhi Lu volumes 53-60 (Zhonghua Book Company, 2024). His teaching excellence is recognized through participation in national first-class courses like "History of Chinese Thought," multiple Hunan University and provincial teaching achievement awards (first and third prizes), Hunan University Excellent Communist Party Member (2022), and Excellent Undergraduate Thesis Supervisor (2023).