Vincent Goossaert is a historian of Chinese religions, with special focues on Taoism. He works mainly with texts (canonical sources, local histories, archives, inscriptions, vernacular literature), but always leaves room for fieldwork, using a historical anthropological approach. He has long focused on institutions and regulations, and is now giving greater attention to practices (spiritual exercises) and ideas (the history of eschatologies). After publishing works on the 20th century, he now focuses on the religious formation of early modern China (10th-14th centuries) and on literate spirituality at the end of the empire. Have a look at his monography "Making the Gods Speak" (Harvard University Press 2022).

His activities are divided between research and teaching, supervision of a group of doctoral students, administrative responsibilities, publishing (he is one of the three editors of T'oung Pao, a reference journal in Sinology) and project management. Since 2019, he has been working on a major international project to systematically describe all Chinese-language religious texts (via an open online database: www.crta.info), to train young researchers to read them across denominations and genres (winter schools, webinars), and to promote research into the genres, modes of production and distribution, and impact of this immense religious literature on Chinese societies.