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Participants:

Ali, Nosheen
Nosheen Ali is a visiting scholar in the Islamic Studies program at Stanford University. She recently finished her Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and is a recipient of the ACLS/Mellon Early Career Fellowship for 2009-2010. Her research examines the processes of political, religious, and ecological state-making in Pakistan’s Northern Areas, as well as the local struggles through which people in this border region have sought to realize a more substantive vision of citizenship. Nosheen serves on the editorial board of SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal), and is a founding member of the international network GRASP (Group for Research in the Anthropology, Sociology, and Politics of Pakistan).

Blackburn, Anne M.
Anne Blackburn is Associate Professor of South Asia Studies and Buddhist Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. After earning her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, she taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina (1996-2002). Her research interests include Buddhist monastic culture, and intellectual and institutional histories of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. She is the author of Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Jeffrey Samuels) of Approaching the Dhamma: Buddhist Texts and Practices in South and Southeast Asia (BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2003). Her new book, tentatively titled, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka, is forthcoming in spring 2010 from The University of Chicago Press. She is now working on a new project, Monks, Texts, and Relics: A History of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia. Click Here for website.

Borchert, Thomas
Thomas Borchert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Vermont, focusing on the religions of East Asia. His principal research interests are in the monastic communities of China and Thailand, and in particular how discourses of nationalism and modernity condition monastic identities. He has published articles in the Journal of Asian Studies and The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and is currently working on a manuscript on monastic education among the Dai-lue, a Theravada minority group of Southwest China.

Chua, Lawrence
Lawrence Chua is a PhD candidate in the History of Architecture at Cornell University. He recently completed his field work in Thailand as a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research fellow. His dissertation research examines the history of modern leisure architecture, public space, and class conflict in 20th century Thailand.

DeBernardi, Jean
is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. She received her training as a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago and has been teaching at the U of A since 1991. Her current research explores the modernization of Daoism, focusing on religious and cultural pilgrimage to the Daoist temple complex at Wudang Mountain, South-central China. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research on Chinese popular religion in Malaysia and Singapore and recent publications include Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community (Stanford University Press, 2004) and The Way that Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia (Stanford University Press, 2006). Click Here for website.

Finucane, Juliana
Juliana Finucane is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Syracuse University, working on her dissertation, "Mediating the Dharma: 'Value Creation' and the globalization of Soka Gakkai in Singapore and Washington, DC." Her research contextualizes the growth of the Buddhist group Soka Gakkai in two global cities, focusing specifically on the role of the media in the group's articulation and propagation of transnational values. She has been teaching classes in religion and anthropology at Wells College since 2006.

Fisher, Gareth
Gareth Fisher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. His work focuses on the revival of lay Buddhism in contemporary mainland China particularly in Beijing, where he recently completed two years of ethnographic research. He is currently examining how new converts become attracted to Buddhist teachings following years of state repression and in an environment of rapid cultural change through globalization. His article on new Buddhist temple construction in mainland China recently appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies. Click Here for website.

Gold, Ann Grodzins
Ann Grodzins Gold is Professor in the Departments of Religion and Anthropology at Syracuse University. Gold's research in North India has focused on religious practices, gender, oral traditions, and oral histories of ecological change. Her publications include numerous articles and four books: Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims, A Carnival of Parting: The Tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (co-authored with Gloria Raheja) and, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan (co-authored with Bhoju Ram Gujar). This last book was awarded the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2004. Gold's recent work has concerned origin tales and miracle tales at rural shrines to regional deities whose healing powers are linked to protected landscapes and natural beauty; her newest project will look at neighborhood, commerce, education and religious pluralism in a small market town. Click Here for website.

Gold, Daniel
Daniel Gold is Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has worked on Hindi Sants (The Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in North Indian Tradition, New York: Oxford, 1987) and problems of writing about religion (Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion, California, 2003). He is currently pursuing ethnographical studies of urban religious life in Gwalior, Central India.

Henderson, Susan R.
Susan R. Henderson is Professor of architectural history in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. Her forthcoming book is Designing for Democracy: Ernst May and New Frankfurt, 1926-1932 (Peter Lang, 2010). The text chronicles the history of a settlement and housing initiative that configured the modern ideal of cultural and technological reform in Weimar Germany. Beyond her specialty in this field, Henderson is an enthusiastic generalist in Middle Eastern and Asian architectural studies. She teaches a yearly course on Islamic architecture, a seminar on Asian cross-cultural topics, and has led a study abroad program in China.

Kim, Eleana
Eleana Kim is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester. Her research since 1999 has examined the political, economic and cultural dimensions of transnational adoption from South Korea, and she has published articles based upon this research in Visual Anthropology Review, Social Text, and Anthropological Quarterly. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2010. Her current research examines the Korean demilitarized zone as a cultural, political and ecological space.

Kong, Lily
Lily Kong is Vice President (University and Global Relations) and concurrently Director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. An internationally recognized geographer, she has worked extensively on concepts of religious space, religious places and landscape politics and religion and the reconceptualization of community in Asia. She serves on numerous editorial boards including Journal of Geographical Science, Journal of Geography of Religion and Belief Systems and is editor of Social and Cultural Geography. Click Here for website.

Kutcher, Norman
Norman Kutcher is Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University, where he specializes in the cultural, social, and intellectual history of late imperial and modern China. Although his interests are diverse, one constant theme in his work is the changing nature of rulership in dynastic China. His book, Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State (Cambridge, 1999), is a study of the changing role of Confucianism as a limit on imperial power. His writings have also appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of Asian Studies, and The Wilson Quarterly. He currently focuses on the domestic aspects of imperial power and is at work on a study of eunuchs in eighteenth-century China. Before coming to Syracuse in 1991, Kutcher was a student of Jonathen Spence and Yu Ying-shih at Yale University. Click Here for website.

Lohokare, Madhura
Madhura Lohokare is currently pursuing her Ph.D at the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University. Prior to this, she has obtained an M.Phil in Community Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, working on a comparative historiography of public health and biomedicine in Britain. She has conducted ethnographic research on indigenous health systems and cultural beliefs about health and illness in Western Maharashtra. Her other areas of interest include exploring processes of cultural production of space and the politics of public space in urban India.

Snow, Alex
Alex Snow is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, and is teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His pedagogical strategies, as well as his research methodologies, employ comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary approaches to Asian religious and philosophical traditions. He also has a keen interest in the ongoing religion and science dialogues, especially metaphoric and analogical approaches to place, self, sound, and vibration. His dissertation is entitled “Listening to Places: A Comparative Study of Zen, Sufism, and Contemporary Cosmology.”

Srinivas, Smriti
Smriti Srinivas is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Srinivas’ research focuses on urban space, social and cultural memory, the body, and religion. Her most recent book, In the Presence of Sai Baba (2008), examines a transnational religious movement centered on the Indian guru, Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926) in three cities—Bangalore, Nairobi, and Atlanta. This work presents insights for the understanding of “urban religion” as well as the relationship between a religious imaginary, understandings of citizenship, sites of sociality, and devotional memory. She is also author of The Mouths of People, the Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh (1998) and Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High Tech City (2001). Srinivas is co-founder of “Nagara,” a center for urban studies, history, and culture based in Bangalore, and she currently serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies. Click Here for website.

Vala, Carsten
Carsten T. Vala is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Pathways to the Pulpit: Leadership Training in “Patriotic” and Unregistered Chinese Protestant Churches, a chapter in Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State, The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2009). His dissertation focuses on the politics of Protestantism in contemporary China.

Waghorne, Joanne Punzo
Joanne Punzo Waghorne currently is working on global gurus and their multiethnic following, especially in Singapore and Chennai. Her previous books include: Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World, The Raja's Magic Clothes: Re-visioning Kingship and Divinity in England's India, Gods of Flesh/Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of Divinity in India (Co-edited with Norman Cutler) and, Images of Dharma: The Epic World of C. Rajagopalachari.

During academic 2007-2008, she was Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellow and Visiting Senior Research Fellow (sabbatical leave program), Asian Research Institute (Globalization and Religion cluster), National University of Singapore. She is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Click Here for website.

Willford, Andrew
Andrew Willford is associate professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University, where he is also chair of the Anthropology Department. His previous research focused on various forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the subject of Tamil plantation communities facing the uncertainties of retrenchment and relocation in Malaysia. His recent publications include Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 2009), co-edited with Eric Tagliacozzo, and Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, co-edited with Kenneth George (Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2005). Click Here for website.

Wu, Keping
Keping Wu received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Boston University. She is currently teaching at the Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong. She did research among lay Buddhist, Christian and popular religious groups in contemporary China, focusing on their engagement with the larger society, religious experience and changing life worlds. Her current research is on religion, media and globalization in contemporary Buddhist revival in mainland China.

Yoo, Yohan
Yohan Yoo is a Syracuse alumnus (M.A. and Ph.D.) and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Seoul National University, South Korea. He has published two books and many journal articles in Korean on theoretical issues.