Michael Puett

Michael Puett serves as the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University, where his interdisciplinary scholarship bridges historical, anthropological, philosophical, and religious frameworks to position Chinese studies within expansive global contexts.

His research portfolio centers on:

• Early Chinese cosmology and self-divinization practices
• Ritual theory and its cross-cultural implications
• Historical debates on innovation and artifice in premodern China
• Comparative analysis of religious systems
• Intersections of philosophy and anthropology in East Asian contexts
• Global intellectual history frameworks

Key publications include The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (2001), To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (2002), and the co-authored Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, which collectively examine how ritual structures human experience beyond modern Western emphases on authenticity.

No scientific awards were documented in the source material.

Information regarding student mentorship, research funding, or laboratory affiliations remains unspecified, though his 2021 presentation "Sound, Time, and the Apocalypse" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science indicates active engagement with international academic communities.