Presenter biographies (in alphabetical order).
Pauline Hope Cheong is Associate Professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University. Her research interests are in communication technologies and culture, including the examination of religious authority and community relations in light of digital and social media developments. Her award winning, multi-method research has been published in more than 50 articles and books, including the Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, The Information Society and the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. She is lead editor of Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture: Perspectives, Practices, Futures (2012) and New Media and Intercultural Communication: Identity, Community and Politics (2012). At ASU, she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Film and Media Studies program and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. She currently serves on the Executive Council of the Center for Asian Research.
Laura Coppens is a doctoral candidate in social anthropology at the University Research Priority Program »Asia and Europe«, University of Zurich. She is currently a visiting fellow at the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History where she is finishing her dissertation on cultural activism and queer subjectivity in Indonesia. Since November 2012 Laura is the new film review editor of Visual Anthropology Review. Her research interest in applied visual anthropology, media and activism is further actualized in her work as filmmaker and curator. As part of her PhD research, she produced the award-winning documentary Children of Srikandi that was created in collaboration with eight Indonesian female directors and explores the lives and experiences of queer women in Indonesia. As a curator, she focuses on South East Asian and queer cinema and has worked for different film festivals such as Asian Hot Shots Berlin, a festival for independent Asian film and video art in Berlin she was a founding member of. Laura has also served on numerous film festival juries including the Teddy Award of the Berlin International Film Festival, the world’s most important award for queer cinema, and was juror at the Cinemanila and Jakarta International Film Festival among others. Currently, she is a member of the pre-screening committee for PBS’s prestigious P.O.V. documentary program.
Gregory Price Grieve is Associate Professor of religious studies and media studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s section on Religion and Popular Culture, and owner of Scuppernong Books. He is the author of numerous articles as well as the monograph Retheorizing Religion in Nepal (2007), and is currently finishing Digital Zen: ContemplatingBuddhism, Virtual Worlds, and Popular Religion (2014). He co-editor of Historicizing Tradition in the Study of Religion (2005), Playing with Religion in Digital Games (2014), and The Pixel In the Lotus: Buddhism, the Internet and Digital Media (2015). Grieve has been awarded numerous grants as well been a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. He is currently working on a textbook for teaching theories of religion through video games, a project on virtual Tibet, and is eagerly looking forward to the release of the Elder Scrolls Online to begin an ethnography of that MMORPG.
Christopher Helland received his doctorate degree in sociology of religion from the University of Toronto in 2004. He was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Goresbrook Institute before taking a tenured stream position at Dalhousie University in 2005. He has a number of publications examining the relationship between the Internet and religious activity and is currently completing a book on this topic for Oxford University Press. Selected publications include: Online Religion/Religion Online and Virtual Communitas (2000); Surfing for Salvation (2002); Popular Religion and the World Wide Web: A Match Made in (Cyber)Heaven (2004); Online Religion as Lived Religion: Methodological Issues in the Study of Religious Participation on the Internet (2005); Diaspora on the Electronic Frontier: Developing Virtual Connections with Sacred Homelands (2007); Canadian Religious Diversity Online: A Network of Possibilities (2008);Online Religion in Canada: From Hype to Hyperlink (2011).
Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange(University of California, 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge 1998) and the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford 1996), A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (Donizelli 1999) and Fragments from Forests and Libraries(Carolina Academic Press 2001). Articles dealing with indigenous religions in Vietnam and California include “Can a Hierarchical Religion Survive Without Its Center? Caodaism, Colonialism and Exile” inHierarchy (2009), “Diaspora as Religious Doctrine: ‘An Apostle of Vietnamese Nationalism’ comes to California” in Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2011), and “A Posthumous Return from Exile: The Legacy of An Anticolonial Religious Leader in Today’s Vietnam” in Southeast Asian Studies (2012). She has produced and written three ethnographic documentaries distributed by www.DER.org, including “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California” (2009).
Samuel Lengen is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity under the supervision of Prof. Peter van der Veer. His Ph.D. project focuses on relations between the Internet, secularist moralities, and personal engagements with religion among young, urban Chinese in contemporary Beijing. He holds an M.A. (2012) in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Modern Chinese Language and Literature, and Modern History from the University of Zurich.
Merlyna Lim is a Visiting Research Scholar/Professor at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She is currently on leave from Arizona State University where she holds a position as a Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement in the Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Social Transformation. Lim is also Director of Participatory Media Lab at ASU. Lim completed her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies and Technology & Development in September 2005 (cum laude) at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. Her teaching and research interests revolve around mutual shaping of technology and society and political culture of technology, especially digital media and information technology, in relations to issues of globalization, democratization, livability and equity. Lim has published extensively on the politics of the internet and social media in Southeast Asia (especially Indonesia) and the Middle East.
Boreth Ly is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Art History and Visual Culture at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has published on ancient as well as contemporary arts and films of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. He is the co-editor (with Nora Taylor) of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology. Ithaca, New York: SEAP, 2012. One of his areas of research is concerned with how contemporary artists and filmmakers of Southeast Asia and its diaspora create works that deal with the difficult issues of trauma, memory, and the body in the post-Vietnam–American War period. In particular, Ly has been thinking and writing about intersections between trauma, memory and cultural production in a late-capitalist and global world. In his writing on art, trauma, and memory, he draws from a rich variety of media, including photography, paintings, television, films, and material cultures, as well as different theoretical frameworks of vision and visuality. His website is: http://havc.ucsc.edu/faculty/boreth-ly.
Intan Paramaditha is a Ph.D candidate in Cinema Studies, New York University, working on her dissertation, “The Wild Child’s Desire: Cinema, Sexual Politics, and the Experimental Nation in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia.” She is a recipient of the 2013-2014 Mellon/ ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council-IDRF and AAUW. She received her B.A. (University of Indonesia) and M.A. (University of California San Diego, with a Fulbright scholarship) in English Literature. Her research interests include gender/sexuality, cultural policy and activism, nation and transnationalism, secularism and religion, and Southeast Asian cinema. Her articles could be found in, among others, Jump Cut, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Asian Cinema.Outside of academia, she writes fiction in Indonesian language and has also been involved in the theater production of Goyang Penasaran (The Obsessive Twist), a play on sexuality, politics, and religion in contemporary Indonesia.
Natasja Sheriff is the international editor at The Revealer and Luce Research Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media. Before joining the Center, Natasja spent more than a decade working with international non-profit research organizations based in Thailand and Malaysia. Her work as a researcher and biologist took her to Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Mali, and Senegal. She moved to New York in 2010 to pursue a career in journalism. Her international experience continues to inform her work as a writer and editor. Natasja holds an M.A. in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism, and a PhD from the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. She writes about politics, religion and media around the world, with an emphasis on South and Southeast Asia. As the Luce Research Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media, her research focuses on citizen journalism, video media, human rights and religion in Malaysia. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Reuters, WNYC, Malaysiakini, Hyperallergic and The Revealer.
Patricia Spyer holds the Chair of Cultural Anthropology of Contemporary Indonesia at Leiden University and was the FAS Global Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Center for Religion & Media and Department of Anthropology from 2009-12. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke 2000), editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge 1998), co-editor of the Handbook of Material Culture (Sage 2006, 2013) and, with Mary Margaret Steedly, of Images That Move (SAR Press 2013). She has published, among other topics, on violence, media and visual culture, materiality, and religion. Her current book project Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and the Work of Appearances in Post-Suharto Indonesia focuses on the mediations of violence and post-violence in the religiously inflected conflict in the Moluccas, Indonesia. In 2014 she will be a Visiting Fellow within the annual theme “Now Showing: Cultures, Judgments, and Research on the Digital Screen” at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australia National University (June-July, November). In October of 2013 she will be launching a new collaborative research project onArchives of the Everyday with colleagues from Heidelberg and Leiden Universities and University College London.
Francesca Tarocco received her M.A. in Buddhist Studies from Venice University and her Ph.D. in Chinese history and Buddhist Studies from SOAS, University of London. In 2005, she was awarded a research grant and fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for the project “Printing and Praying: The Buddhist Press in Modern China”. She is the author of The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma(Routledge, 2008) and has co-authored two other books on contemporary China. Her recent articles and book chapters include: “Terminology and Religious Identity: Buddhism and the Genealogy of the Term Zongjiao” (Brill, 2011); “On the Market: Consumption and Material Culture in Modern Chinese Buddhism” (Religion; 2011: 41/4); “Paper Metaphors, On Yan Changjiang’s Photographs” (Fantom Photography Quarterly, 2011:7); “Pluralism and its Discontents: Buddhism and Proselytizing in Modern China” (ARI-Springer Asia Series, forthcoming) and “Digital Religiosities: Sinophone Buddhism in the Information Age” (De Gruyter, forthcoming). Her current research includes a long term project on the history of Chinese Buddhist photography and a study of urban religiosities in contemporary Shanghai. Her current book project is tentatively entitled “The Re-enchantment of Modernity: Photography and Chinese Buddhism”. Francesca teaches Chinese religions and contemporary Chinese visual culture at NYU Shanghai and is one of the founders of the interdisciplinary research platform Shanghai Studies Society (http://www.shanghaistudies.net/).
Sahana Udupa is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. Her current research explores the role of social media in shaping religious politics in Mumbai city. Her work on news production and urban politics in the globalizing city of Bangalore is published in American Ethnologist, Media, Culture and Society, and other reputed journals. The book manuscript based on this research is under review. Her research interests include anthropology of news cultures, media policy, and media and religion. Disciplinary interests span anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and policy studies. She is also an affiliate with the Centre for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Angela Zito writes, teaches and curates at NYU as Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Program in Religious Studies, and associate faculty in Cinema Studies. She founded and directs the Center for Religion and Media and has co-produced four versions of the biennial documentary film festival Reel China @NYU. Her first documentary, Writing in Water (2012, 42 min) is part of a study in Beijing about places where people congregate, using the opportunity to create new public spaces as they produce cultural expressions. She organized this conference as part of a current project at CRM with Faye Ginsburg on “Religion in the digital age: Knowledge, politics and practice in an international frame”. Find her writings at http://www.angelazito.com/.