Notes on Contributors
Jørn Borup
is an associate professor at the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University. His research areas include Japanese Buddhism, Buddhism in the West, religious diversity, spirituality and religion and migration. Besides articles for journals and publications in Danish, he is the author of Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhism. Myōshinji, a Living Religion (Brill 2008), Eastspirit. Transnational Spirituality and Religious Circulation in East and West (co-edited with M.Q. Fibiger, Brill 2017) and The Critical Analysis of Religious Diversity (co-edited with L. Kühle and W. Hoverd Brill 2018).
Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger
is associate professor at the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on Hinduism in general and in diaspora in particular and how concepts and worldviews travel between East and West. She has conducted extensive field research in Denmark and in Sri Lanka and also among Hindus in Mauritius and in India. Some of her latest publications are ‘Hinduism in Denmark’, Oxford Bibliographies, 2018, ‘Alike but different: The understanding of Rituals among Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Denmark in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2017 and Eastspirit. Transnational spirituality and religious circulation in East and West (co-edited with J. Borup, Brill 2017).
Don Baker
is professor of Korean History and Civilization in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Korean Spirituality (University of Hawaii Press 2008) as well as numerous articles on various religious traditions in both traditional and modern Korea. He is currently preparing for publication a translation of a nineteenth-century work by a Confucian scholar who, influenced by Christianity, promoted a theistic version of Confucianism
Ugo Dessì
is Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Cardiff University, adjunct professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, Leipzig University, and honorary research associate at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town. He has published widely on Japanese religions, including Japanese Religions and Globalization (Routledge 2013), and The Global Repositioning of Japanese Religions: An Integrated Approach (Routledge 2017). His last book Religioni e globalizzazione. Un’introduzione (Carocci 2019) is an introduction to the general topic of religion under globalization.
Chung Van Hoang
is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Religious Studies under the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. His main research interests are state-religion relationship, religious innovation, and religious diversification in contemporary Vietnam. He was a former Visiting Fellow in the Vietnam Studies Programme of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore (2017–2018). His most recent publication is New Religions and State’s response to Religious diversification in Contemporary Vietnam: Tension from the Reinvention of the Sacred (Springer 2017). He has also a number of articles in published in international and national journals.
Ayelet Harel-Shalev
is Associate Professor at the Conflict Management and Resolution Program and The Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Harel-Shalev is the author of The Challenge of Sustaining Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies, 2010. Her book has won the Israeli Political Science Association (ISPSA) prize for the best book of 2010. A second edition of the book was published in India by Cambridge University Press, India, and Foundation Books, 2013. Harel-Shalev is specializing and publishing in various fields as – Ethnic conflicts in Deeply Divided Societies; Religion and Politics; Feminist IR; and Gender and Politics.
Noa Levy
is a PhD candidate in the African Studies track of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Her PhD research focuses on unaccompanied child and youth migrants at the Zimbabwean – South African borderland. Levy has co-edited two books in Hebrew, The field in Africa: Experiences of Research and the Construction of knowledge and Letters from Africas, both aim to bring Africa-related experiences to Israeli readers.
Gideon Elazar
is an anthropologist focused primarily on religion and ethnicity in China’s ethnic southwest. His doctoral thesis, written in Haifa University, dealt with contemporary Evangelical missionaries working in Yunnan and their interaction with local minorities and state authorities. In 2016–17 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters in the University of the Negev, Beer Sheva. Currently, Gideon teaches courses in Chinese history and religion and comparative readings of Buddhist and Jewish-Hasidic texts at Bar Ilan University and Ben Gurion University. Since September 2018 he has been conducting research for Ariel University focusing on Christian Zionist activity in Judea and Samaria.
Santosh K. Singh
is a Sociologist with the Global Studies Programme, School of Global Affairs, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). His research interest broadly lies in the area of religion, caste movements, globalization, and village-studies. His publications include “Dalit Politics and its fragments in Punjab: Does religion hold the key?” (Economic and Political Weekly 2018), “The Caste question and Songs of Protest in Punjab” (EPW 2017), and “Deras as Little fiefdoms: Understanding the Dera Sacha Sauda Phenomenon” (Economic and Political Weekly 2017). He is currently working on a monograph based on ethnographic work in Punjab.
Yu Tao
is a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Western Australia (UWA), where he teaches contemporary Chinese society and language and coordinates the Chinese Studies major. Trained as a political sociologist in the Universities of Beijing, Cambridge, and Oxford, Yu Tao’s research primarily focuses on the interaction between religious groups, civic organisations and local state agencies in contemporary Chinese society and overseas Chinese communities.
Ed Griffith
is a principal lecturer and the course leader in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). Trained at SOAS (University of London) and Leeds, Ed Griffith’s research interests are mainly focussed on the interactions of major powers in East Asia, in particular, China’s approach to its changing role in the region. His PhD examined the response of China to the Yasukuni Shrine controversy during Koizumi Junichiro’s tenure.
Satoko Fujiwara
is Chair/Professor of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Tokyo and acting Secretary General of the International Association for the History of Religions. English publications include: “Buddhism in RE Textbooks in England: Before Shap and After the Call for Community Cohesion,” Religion & Education, 2018, “This Is not a Religion!: ‘The Treachery of the Images’ of Aum, Yasukuni and Al-Qaeda in Japanese Textbooks,” in Textbook Violence, ed. by B.O. Andreassen, J. R. Lewis and S. A. Thobro, (Equinox, 2017), “ ‘Geertz vs Asad’ in RE Textbooks: A Comparison between England’s and Indonesia’s Textbooks,” in Religious Education in a Global-Local World, ed. by J. Berglund, Y. Shanneik and B. Bocking, (Springer, 2016).
Uwe Skoda
is Associate Professor for India and South Asia Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. Currently, he is focusing on the one hand on the field of political anthropology – particularly transformations of kingship, indigenous people and domestic politics and on the other hand on visual culture and especially photography. His recent books focus on “India and its Visual Cultures. Community, Class and Gender in a Symbolic Landscape” (Sage 2018, co-edited with Birgit Lettmann) and “Highland Odisha. Life and Society beyond the coastal world (Primus 2017, with Biswamoy Pati).
Kalinga Tudor Silva
is professor emeritus at University of Peradeniya where he served the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Arts in various capacities for almost 40 years. Currently he serves as the Resident Director of the Intercollegiate Sri Lanka Education Program. His recent publications include “Decolonization, Development and Disease: A Social History of Malaria in Sri Lanka” published in 2014 by Orient Blackswan, Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: a Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace published by Pluto Press in 2015 and Religious Interface and Contestations between Buddhists and Muslims in Sri Lanka published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in 2016.
Martin A. Tsang
is the Cuban Heritage Collection Librarian and Curator of Latin American Collections at the University of Miami. He is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores Afro-Chinese religiosity in Cuba as well as working on issues concerning HIV in Cuba and the wider Caribbean. Martin is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and is an artist of Afro-Cuban religious beadwork which has been exhibited in several museums and university galleries.