Contributors
Fatema Aarshe is an MSS student currently studying in the Department of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is interested in labor studies, political ecology, urbanization, class-based social inequality, and public health.
Yasmeen Arif is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research focuses on the experiences of women living alone in Pakistani cities. Her previous research explored urban environmentalism in Pakistan and British Muslim responses to racialization and anti-Muslim prejudice.
Indira Arumugam is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. An anthropologist whose research interests include rituals, indigenous deities, and popular Hinduism, she has published extensively on the gift, animal sacrifice, and kinship. Her monograph Visceral Politics: Intimate Imaginaries of Power in South India is forthcoming.
Swayam Bagaria received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. His research is on the relation between popular Hinduism and political populism in contemporary India.
Raka Banerjee holds a PhD in women’s studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her doctoral thesis, “Adrift in the Bay, at Home in the Island: Post-Partition ‘Settler Women’ in Neil Island, Bay of Bengal,” is an interdisciplinary study incorporating island studies and partition studies, through the lens of gender, to explore the identity making of Bengali settler women in the Andaman Islands.
Malini Bhattacharjee works as assistant professor at the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bangalore. Her research revolves around issues of religious nationalism, the politics of disaster relief, and the intersections emerging between religion, development, and public policy in contemporary India. Her recent book, Disaster Relief and the RSS: Resurrecting “Religion” through Humanitarianism (2019), examines the political implications of the humanitarian work of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Md. Khaled Bin Oli Bhuiyan received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology from Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is particularly interested in the interplay of colonial hegemony and biomedical discourse in the construction of the body, and he strives to develop analytical skills to understand health, society, and culture.
Chang Hsun is a research fellow and director of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She obtained her PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She has been conducting research on folk religion and folk medicine in Taiwan and China since 1990.
Jack Meng-Tat Chia is assistant professor of history and religious studies at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea (2020), as well as articles in Asian Ethnology, China Quarterly, Contemporary Buddhism, Critical Asian Studies, and History of Religions.
Terence Chong is director (research) and deputy chief executive officer at the ISEAS—Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. He is a sociologist whose research interests include heritage, arts, and cultural policies in Singapore, and new Chinese migrants and Christianity in Southeast Asia.
Ankana Das is a PhD student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. She studies religious consciousness, transformation, and transgressions, looking at how caste, class, and political influence permeate layers of religious meaning making. Her work involves situating syncretic religion in the neoliberal market space and the broader Hindutva politics in the context of Bonbibi veneration in the Sundarban delta.
Deepsikha Dasgupta is pursuing a master’s degree in sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. Her research interests include religion, medical anthropology, cultural studies, and gender. For her undergraduate dissertation, she worked on exploring the interface of the COVID-19 pandemic, biomedicine, alternative healing practices, and Sitala worship in Bengal.
Nia Deliana holds a PhD from International Islamic University of Malaysia. Her expertise revolves around Acehnese historical transboundary relations in the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. She has written more than seventy opinion pieces independently for printed and digital publications in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Beverly Anne Devakishen is a researcher in media studies, specializing in the impact of digital media on democracy. She has a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies from the National University of Singapore and is hoping to go on to a PhD in media and communications in the near future, focusing on the Southeast Asian region.
Mariano Errichiello is a PhD candidate at SOAS University of London. His research focuses on contemporary Zoroastrianism in India and its related languages. Mariano’s interests include colonial and postcolonial history, anthropology of ritual, sociology of religion, and sociology of organizations. He is particularly interested in Zoroastrian esotericism and its theoretical formulation.
Amelia Fauzia is professor and head of Magister Program in Islamic History and Civilization, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Syarif Hidayatullah Islamic University, Jakarta. She is also director of Social Trust Fund UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta.
Nalika Gajaweera is a research anthropologist at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. Her specializations are in the anthropology of religion, with a specific interest in the intersections of Buddhism, race, ethnonationalism, and gender. She has studied these issues in the context of Sri Lanka and the United States. She received her PhD from the University of California, Irvine.
Kanchana Dodan Godage is a political scientist currently teaching at the Open University of Sri Lanka, Nawala, Colombo. She is interested in the electoral process, levels of government, and exploring how ethnic diversities interact and influence different layers of policy making and implementation. She received a BA and an MA in political science from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. She also has an MA in public policy and governance from North South University, Bangladesh.
Daniel P.S. Goh is associate professor of sociology, associate provost (undergraduate education) and vice dean (special programmes) at NUS College, National University of Singapore. He is a comparative-historical sociologist who studies state formation, postcolonialisms, race and multiculturalism, urbanisms, and religion.
Emily Zoe Hertzman is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Chinese Indonesian mobilities and identities. She received a BA and MA from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from the University of Toronto (2017). She joined the Asia Research Institute as a research fellow at the National University of Singapore in 2021.
Siti Zubaidah Ismail is associate professor at the Shariah and Law Department, Academy of Islamic Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia. Her interest is on Islam as a way of life while pursuing academic endeavor on the implementation of Islamic law and the interaction between Islamic law and society.
Nurul Fadiah Johari is a research associate at the Social Service Research Centre in the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the interplay of power and ideology in the construction of dominant narratives on socioeconomic issues, as well as the intersection of socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and gender in the shaping of policies and their impact on marginalized communities.
Sinah Theres Kloß is leader of the research group Marking Power: Embodied Dependencies, Haptic Regimes and Body Modification at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. She holds a PhD in social and cultural anthropology from Heidelberg University.
Natalie Lang is a research fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and an associated junior fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt. She is the author of Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion (2021).
Erica M. Larson is a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Boston University. Her research examines the intersection of education, religion, ethics, and politics in Indonesia, and her monograph, Ethics of Belonging: Education, Religion, and Politics in Manado, Indonesia, is forthcoming with the University of Hawai‘i Press.
Lei Ting is a PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo. Her research field covers folkloristic study, vernacular art, and representation and self-expressions of rural populations in China, especially Jinshan peasant painting in Shanghai.
Alvin Eng Hui Lim is a performance, religion, and theater researcher. He is assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His first monograph, Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance (2018), studies how lived religious practices in contemporary Singapore perform in combination with digital technology.
Lim Peng Chew graduated from the Taiwan National Tsing Hua University with a master’s degree in anthropology. His research field is Chinese folk religion. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at Taiwan Tsing Hua University. His research topic is educational anthropology and cultural heritage education.
Marianna Lis is a scholar interested in contemporary wayang, theater, and music in post-traditional Indonesia. She received her PhD in theater studies at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw in 2017. Her monograph Wayang. Jawajski teatr cieni (Wayang. Javanese shadow puppet theater, 2019) focused on contemporary wayang, summarizing nine years of her research in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Carola E. Lorea is a scholar interested in oral traditions and popular religions in South Asia. She was a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore before starting a professorship of Rethinking Global Religion at the University of Tübingen. She received research fellowships from IIAS, Gonda Foundation (Leiden), and SAI (Heidelberg) to study traveling archives of songs in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. Her monograph (Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman, 2016) discusses the intersections of religion, displacement, and sacred sounds through the lens of performance.
Neena Mahadev is assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College. Her research in Sri Lanka, Singapore, and inter-Asian linkages focuses on the interplay between Theravāda (Pāli) Buddhism, Pentecostalism, and Roman Catholicism, and the innovations that arise within agonistic milieus. Her religion and COVID-19 research was supported by the Yap Kim Hao Fund. She serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Global Buddhism and New Direction in the Anthropology of Christianity (Bloomsbury). Her first book, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, is forthcoming.
Muhammad Lutfi Bin Othman is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology and sound studies. His thesis focuses on Sufism in Singapore and the links between sonic performances and experiential knowledge. He is also interested in the transnational solidarity between members of global Sufi orders and Muslims in Singapore and the role that sonic performances and audiovisual material play in fostering such relationships.
Mukul Pandey is pursuing a PhD in sociology of conservation and sustainable agricultural practices. His research interests lie in the intersections of agrarian studies, sociology of science and technology, and ontologies of development and sustainability.
Dishani Roy is currently pursuing an MA degree in sociology from Presidency University, Kolkata, India. Her research interests include religion, caste, and medical anthropology with a specific focus on the mind-body continuum. At present, she is working on the Caste Project at the Centre for Regional Research and Sustainability Studies.
Louie Jon A. Sánchez is associate professor of broadcast communication at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman. He teaches communication, television, and teleserye (Filipino TV soap operas) studies. He is associate editor of Suvannabhumi, a multidisciplinary journal of Southeast Asian studies, Korea Institute of ASEAN Studies, Busan University of Foreign Studies.
Shen Yeh-Ying is a sociocultural anthropologist who obtained her PhD in Chinese studies from the National University of Singapore in 2019. She has published several works on religious movements among overseas Chinese communities and women in Chinese religions, in particular Yiguandao. She is an adjunct lecturer at the School of Humanities and Behavioural Sciences, Singapore University of Social Science.
Yuki Shiozaki is an associate professor at the School of International Relations, the University of Shizuoka, in Japan. He studies Islam in Southeast Asia. His research interests include historical interactions between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He has published articles on Islamic scholars, Islamic literature, and religious interactions in Southeast Asia.
Show Ying Ruo is research fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She is a historian of modern China and holds a PhD in Chinese studies from the National University of Singapore (2017). She has published works on women and gender in Chinese Buddhism, women’s religious networks, Chinese diaspora, and Chinese religious texts.
Esmond Chuah Meng Soh is an independent researcher who has just completed his master of arts (history) degree from the Nanyang Technological University, School of Humanities, Singapore. His research interests include the history of religion, diasporic Chinese religion, and the history of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.
Tran Thi Thuy Binh, a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland, conducts research on gender, religion, and sexuality. Her primary research interests are rituals, LGBTQIA movements and queer people, and Dao Mau—the Viet beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of the Four Realms.
Vo Duy Thanh is a cultural anthropologist whose studies primarily focus on contemporary Hoa Hao Buddhist charity in southern Vietnam. He holds a PhD from the Australian National University. He has been working as a researcher and lecturer at the Climate Change Institute, An Giang University—Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City.
Dean Wang is an adjunct assistant professor of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore. He has recently completed his PhD dissertation on the worship of underworld gods in Singapore. Dean specializes in the research of Chinese religion, interfaith studies, and popular culture. He is currently researching local Hainanese Daoist altars in Singapore.
Catherine West recently completed a PhD at Deakin University, Australia. Her thesis looked at the postindependence transformation of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in terms of the urban environment, social formation, and religion. Catherine shares her time among anthropological research, consulting in the social services sector, and running a small French bistro.
Lynn Wong is an independent researcher and filmmaker in a race against time to document and revive disappearing foods, festivals, and heritage in Singapore. Her research focuses on the Chinese diaspora and their involvement in historical places of worship, clan associations, and everyday customs.
Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University, specializing in religion and ecology in modern Southeast Asia. She holds a PhD in history from Yale University. Her first monograph, The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia, is under contract with University of Washington Press.
Saymon Zakaria is a writer, researcher, and deputy director of the Bangla Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is internationally recognized for his ethnographic field surveys that relate to intangible cultural heritage. In English, he authored Pronomohi Bongomata: Indigenous Cultural Forms of Bangladesh (2011). He was the recipient of the Bangla Academy Literary Award 2019.
Philipp Zehmisch is a social and cultural anthropologist working at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. He observed the unfolding of COVID-19 in Pakistan while teaching anthropology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. His contribution is based on observations, conversations, media reports, and online classes with undergraduate students.
Zhao Yuanhao is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern languages and cultures from Ohio State University. Zhao’s field of interests includes narrative culture, material culture, death anthropology, and life history. He has been conducting fieldwork among the Chinese Hui ethnic minority.
Yijiang Zhong is professor in Japanese history and religion in the Faculty of Intercultural Communication, Komatsu University, Japan. His research interests include religion, secularity, modern state, the Japanese empire, and history of space and nature. He published a book on Shinto and is working on his second book project, tentatively titled “The Backside of Japan: An Imperial History of Space in Northeast Asia, 1868–1984.”