Professor of the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and Department of History, Fudan University. His research focuses on Chinese religion, ideology and literature and has published many important works in these fields. Among them seven have been translated into English, Japanese and Korean. He has received several prestigious book awards in China. Since 1997, he has been visiting professor of Kyoto University in Japan, City University of Hong Kong, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and National Taiwan University. In 2009, he was appointed as one of the first Princeton Global Scholars. In 2014, he received the Paju Book Award of Korea and the Asia-Pacific Prize of Japan. In 2015,he received the Hongkong Book Prize and Simian inovation Award. In 2017, he received Wu Yu-zhang humanities and social sciences Award.