Edward L. Davis

Associate Professor in the Department of History, at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

China: Middle Period

BA Harvard, 1976; MA, PhD California-Berkeley, 1981, 1994

Ned Davis received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976 and his Ph.D in Chinese History from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Middle Imperial China (750 - 1600) and the history of Chinese religions from the ancient period until the present. His major publications include Society and the Supernatural in Song China (2001) and The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (2005) and numerous articles on the development of popular temple cults in the Tang and Song dynasties. He regularly teaches honors sections of World Cultures (161a) for freshman; the general survey of Chinese history (311 and 312); upper division courses on pre-modern Chinese political culture (416); graduate seminars on various topics in ancient, early-imperial, and middle-imperial Chinese history (661b/c); and undergraduate and graduate courses in historiography (396 and 602).

Representative publications:

Society and the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu, 2003).

"Arms and the Tao. Hero Cult and Empire in Traditional China. 1," in Sôdai no shakai to shûkyô [Song Society and Religion], (Tokyo, 1985).

Co-editor, The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London, New York, 2006).

Society and the Supernatural in Song China is at once a meticulous examination of spirit-possession and exorcism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a social history of the full panoply of China's religious practices and practitioners at the moment when she was poised to dominate the world economy. Although the Song dynasty (960-1276) is often identified with the establishment of Confucian orthodoxy, Edward Davis demonstrates the renewed vitality of the dynasty's Taoist, Buddhist, and local religious traditions.