Rong Huang is a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She received her PhD and MA from Harvard University, and her BA from Tsinghua University. She was the William R. Tyler Fellow in the Byzantine Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks from 2021 to 2023, where she co-curated an exhibition entitled “Garden and Nature in the Medieval World.” She specializes in ancient and medieval Chinese religions, early Christianity, and the development of the Silk Road. Her research focuses on interpreting the interaction of East Syriac Christianity with Chinese Buddhism and Daoism after this Christian tradition arrived in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE).
Her doctoral dissertation delves into a unique set of theological texts by these Syriac missionaries, exploring their accommodation and adaptation of Christian theology to its host culture. Whereas modern scholarship has largely viewed these texts as a strange amalgam of Christian, Buddhist, and Daoist teaching to the extent that they can no longer be treated as Christian texts, she argues that these missionaries employ in an artful way the multi-layered Buddhist teaching of emptiness to communicate their asceticism and mysticism, and use skillfully the Buddhist concept of the Buddha nature and the Daoist concept of the soul to demonstrate their Christian anthropology. This work thus illuminates how the interaction of East Syriac Christianity with Chinese Buddhism and Daoism helps broaden the horizons of all these traditions and reveals the profound communicability among them.
Drawing on her dissertation, she plans to embark on a new research project at ISAW aimed at reconstructing the whole picture of the theology of this Christian tradition in China through a careful examination of both the East Syriac Christian and the Chinese religious contexts. She will not only utilize the manuscripts written in Chinese, Sogdian, and Syriac, found in Dunhuang and Turfan, both in the western region of China, but also examine the tomb inscriptions of these Christian believers and the artifacts made by the Sogdian merchants who were responsible for bringing East Syriac Christianity to China. Moving beyond theological texts to include perspectives from the material culture, this study probes deep into the mentality of the East Syriac Christians in China and the various ways they presented themselves to the Tang Chinese audience. At the broadest level, her historical reconstruction offers a model of theology enriched by Christianity’s interaction with all the other equally profound traditions.