Research and Teaching Interests: 

Historical anthropology, anthropology of religion, ritual theory, anthropology of the state, comparative anthropology; China.

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as a member of the Committee on the Study of Religion.  Puett joined the Harvard faculty in 1994 after earning his M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1994) from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. In his research, Puett aims to bring the study of China into our larger theoretical and comparative frameworks. His primary interests focus on the historical anthropology of China and on the ways in which ritual theory, social theory, and political theory from China may enrich contemporary theoretical discussions.  Puett is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Puett has received multiple awards for his teaching and advising, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award, the Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising, and the Harvard College Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.  Since 2012 his General Education course, “Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory,” has been one of the most highly enrolled undergraduate courses at Harvard.