Notes on Contributors
Editors
Jørn Borup Ph.D. (2002), Aarhus University, is associate professor in the study of religion at that university. He has published monographs and articles, and edited anthologies related to Buddhism, Japanese religion and the study of religion, including Decolonising the Study of Religion. Who Owns Buddhism? (2023).
Elisabetta Porcu is Associate Professor and Head of the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town. She has published extensively on Japanese religions and among her publications are Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture (Brill, 2008), and Negotiations of the Sacred: Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri and the Shifting Boundaries of a Japanese Festival (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2026). She is the founding editor of the Journal of Religion in Japan (Brill).
Contributors
Laura Brandt M.A., is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Heidelberg University. Her research explores modern transformations of Buddhism, as well as the relationship between new religious movements and museums in contemporary Japan.
Laurence Cox is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, specialising in social movements and Buddhist studies. His Buddhist studies research includes the monographs The Irish Buddhist (with Alicia Turner and Brian Bocking) and Buddhism and Ireland along with articles such as “Why do European Buddhists meditate?” and “The first Buddhist Mission to the West” (with Brian Bocking and Yoshinaga Shin’ichi). He is co-editor, with Ugo Dessì and Lukas Pokorny, of East Asian Religiosities in the European Union.
Fujii Shūhei is a lecturer at Tokyo Kasei University in Japan. He earned a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Tokyo. His research primarily investigates the intersection of science and religion, with a particular emphasis on the cognitive science of religion and evolutionary biology. He is the author of Kagaku de shūkyō ga kaimei dekiru ka (2023).
Ioannis Gaitanidis is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global and Transdisciplinary Studies, Chiba University (Japan). His research focuses on alternative therapies and contemporary religion in Japan. He has authored Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (2022) and co-edited Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries (2025).
John Ó Laoidh is an independent researcher and former Irish Research Council Scholar with a PhD from Maynooth University. He was an assistant lecturer at the International School of Buddhist Studies near Seoul run by Dongguk University and the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism. While at Maynooth he conducted an ethnography on contemporary Korean Sŏn Buddhist teaching methodologies in Europe, has written about East Asian religiosities in Ireland and is currently working on publishing his Korean Buddhism-related research.
Louella Matsunaga is an anthropologist of Japan, who is currently conducting research into the globalisation of Shin Buddhism. Her research interests include gender, embodiment, and ritual. She is also an ordained priest in the Hongwanji-ha tradition, receiving her ordination in Kyoto in 2019. She has lectured in anthropology at Waseda University in Tokyo, and in the UK at SOAS (University of London), Oxford Brookes University, and Oxford University. She is now retired, but retains research associate positions at Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University.
Moriya Tomoe is a senior research fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan. Her research revolves around the globalization of Buddhism and modern Buddhist history. Her works include Issei Buddhism in the Americas (co-edited with Duncan Ryūken Williams, University of Illinois Press) and Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, vol. 3 Comparative Religions (co-edited with Jeff Wilson).
Jan Marc Nottelmann-Feil studied in Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Japanese Studies, mathematics, Logic and Theory of Science. M.A. (Magister Artium) in 1996. 1996/97 he studied at Taisho University, Tokyo, Buddhist Studies. Since 2000 he is scientific employee in the EKO House of Japanese Culture, Düsseldorf.
Esben Petersen is an Assistant Professor and missionary at the Faculty of Theology, Kwansei Gakuin University. He specializes in Japanese church history and mission studies. Since 2022 he has also been editing the NCC journal, Japanese Religions.
Lukas K. Pokorny is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. Large parts of his current research focus on millenarianism and esotericism, new religious movements, as well as new, alternative, and Asian diasporic religions in Austria. Recent publications include the Handbook of East Asian New Religious Movements (co-edited with Franz Winter; Brill 2018); The Occult Nineteenth Century: Roots, Developments, and Impact on the Modern World (co-edited with F. Winter, 2021); Appropriating the Dao: The Euro-American Esoteric Reception of China (co-edited with F. Winter, 2024).
Inken Prohl is a Professor of Religious Studies at Heidelberg University. She has conducted fieldwork in Japan and Germany for several years. Her current research focuses on modern transformations of Buddhism, new approaches to Material Religion, and the relationship between religion and AI.
Paride Stortini is a research fellow at Ghent University. He has a PhD in history of religions from the University of Chicago, and BA and MA degrees in East Asian languages and cultures from the Universities of Venice and Padua. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern and contemporary Japanese Buddhism. His first book explores the reimagination of India in the formulation of religion in modern Japan. His current project investigates the concept of Silk Road in the religious imaginary of twentieth century Japan.