Research

Overview

My research specialties include Warring States (5th-3rd c. B.C.E.) Chinese thought, religious studies (comparative religion, cognitive science and evolution of religion), cognitive linguistics (blending and conceptual metaphor theory), ethics (virtue ethics, moral psychology), evolutionary psychology, cultural evolutionary studies, digital humanities, the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences, and the classical Chinese language.

I am also Director of the Database of Religious History (DRH) project, based at UBC but involving a worldwide network of postdocs, editors and contributors. The DRH is currently in year 3 of a $4.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will support our projects until June 2025. The DRH also has a long-term institutional commitment from UBC to support basic operations.

On this page you can find my articles and book chapters (which can be browsed by category or reverse chronologically), as well as my full CV and CV summary.

My academic training includes 2 years of undergrad at Princeton (biology), a BA with Distinction from Stanford (Chinese) in 1991, an MA from UC Berkeley (classical Chinese) in 1993, and a Ph.D. from Stanford (Religious Studies) in 1998, as well as language training at the Chinese Language Center (Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC), the Goethe-Institut (Goettingen, Berlin) and Alliance Française (Paris). I’ve held academic appointments in university departments of Religious Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Asian Studies and Philosophy, with an adjunct appointment in Psychology. At UBC, I recently moved from Asian Studies to Philosophy, while maintaining adjunct appointments in Asian Studies and Psychology.

In addition to three academic monographs, two trade books, a full length annotated translation, an edited volume, and three edited special journal issues, I’ve published over approximately 50 refereed journal articles in top journals in a wide variety of fields, including Nature, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Science, Ethics, Annual Review of Psychology, Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Asian Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Religion, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Religion Brain & Behaviour, Journal of Religious Ethics, Human Nature, Numen, Journal of Cognitive Historiography, and Evolutionary Human Studies, as well as around 25 books chapters and book reviews. My work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian and Dutch, and many of my journal articles have been reprinted in edited volumes or academic handbooks.

Since 1999 I’ve also delivered close to 200 conference presentations and invited lectures throughout North America and also in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Japan, Israel, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand. These have included the Tang Junyi Lecture (University of Michigan), the James & David Orr Memorial Lecture on Culture & Religion (Dartmouth College), the Hall Peebles Lecture (Wabash College), the Walter Powell Distinguished Lectures in Philosophy (Linfield College) and the Education as Self-Fashioning Lecture Series (Stanford), as well as invited lectures at Collège de France (Paris), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Studies, Berlin), Università Ca’Foscari (Venice, Italy), The Vancouver Institute, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Tokyo University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Fudan University and Renmin University.

As a PI I have been awarded over $11 million (CAD) in grants, including a recent $4.8 million grant (w/ Co-PI M. Willis Monroe) from the John Templeton Foundation for “Exploring the Cultural Evolution of Religion Employing a Large-Scale, Quantitative-Qualitative Historical Database” (2021-2024), a $2.4 million grant (w/ Co-PI Michael Muthukrishna, LSE) from Templeton Religious Trust for “The Database of Religious History: A Digital Humanities Approach to Religious Cultural History” (2017-2020) and a $3 million grant for “The Evolution of Religion and Morality” from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (2012-2018).

Major research award and honors include the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2017), the Annual Best Essay Award from Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy (2012), and the American Academy of Religion, Best First Book in the History of Religions award (2003). I was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2015-16) and a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition (2005-2015). In 2017 I was named a Distinguished University Scholar at UBC.

In terms of research dissemination to the general public, I have published two trade books, Trying Not to Try (2014) and Drunk (2021). They have collectively sold over 100,000 copies, been translated into over 10 languages, and have been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, LA Review of Books, Financial Times, The Guardian, NPR, BBC, CBC and many other newspapers, websites, radio shows and TV spots around the world. I have also appeared on scores of podcasts, including the Joe Rogan Experience. My research more generally, as well as our work in the Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC) group at UBC, has been featured in Science, the BBC, CBC, The National Post, and the Vancouver Sun.