Presenter biographies (in alphabetical order)
Maria José de Abreu is a cultural anthropologist who has worked on questions of embodiment, technology, and movement in the context of the Charismatic Catholic movement in contemporary Brazil. Her work is both grounded in ethnographic research as well as engaging with a range of anthropological and philosophical debates about time, space, the human senses and their technological extensions on which she has published in various journals and edited volumes. Her latest project deals with theories on time and utopia in media, religion, finance and politics with particular focus on Portugal and Brazil.
Alexandra Boutros is an assistant professor in Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Canada. Her research is generally concerned with the intersection of media, technology and identity within the context of religious, social and cultural movements. Recent publications include *Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Mobility*, William Straw and Alexandra Boutros, ads, Montreal, Kingston:McGill-Queens University Press, 2010. and “Gods on the Move: The Mediatization of Haitian Vodou,” in *Culture and Religion*, 12:2, 2011.
Ruth Deller is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, UK where she leads the BA Media course. Her PhD thesis looked at how factual British TV programmes presented religion and spirituality and she is currently working on a book and a number of other publications based on this research. She has also published on a variety of media related subjects, including Doctor Who and religion, television audiences and Twitter, talent shows and gender/sexuality and online fan communities. She is part of the organising team for the Internet Research 13.0 conference taking place in Salford in October 2012. Outside of work, her interests include cookery and drama.
Elizabeth Drescher is a scholar, researcher, writer, and speaker on the spiritual lives of ordinary believers today and in the past. She is a lecturer in religious studies and the graduate program in pastoral ministries at Santa Clara University. Her recent research and writing has focused on the spiritual and pastoral implications of the increasing integration of digital social media in everyday life. Drescher is a frequent contributor to the online magazine Religion Dispatches. Her work has been highlighted by the Atlantic Monthly, the Utne Reader, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Australian Radio National, the BBC, CNN, State of Belief Radio, and other national and international news outlets. Drescher has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards for the study of spirituality in everyday life and teaching in religion and spirituality. She is the author of Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation (Morehouse, 2011) and, with Keith Anderson, Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012). Her latest book project, Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of Religious Nones (Oxford University Press, 2013), focuses on believers and seekers unaffiliated with institutional religions who answer “none” when asked with what religion they identify.
Nabil Echchaibi is assistant professor of journalism and media studies and associate director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His research is focused on identity, religion, and the role of media in shaping and reflecting modern religious subjectivities among Muslims in the Middle East and in diaspora. His work on diasporic media and the leveling of religious authority through the proliferation of Islamic media has appeared in various international publications such as Javnost, International Communication Gazette, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, and Media Development. He is the author of Voicing Diasporas: Ethnic Radio in Paris and Berlin Between Cultural Renewal and Retention (Lexington 2011) and co-author of International Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics (Peter Lang 2009).
Patrick Eisenlohr is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Beginning September 2012 he will be Professor of Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen. He obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2001 and an M.A. from the Karl-Ruprechts Universität Heidelberg in 1995. He previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis and New York University, and has conducted research on transnational Hindu and Muslim networks, language and diaspora and the field of linguistic anthropology more generally, and media technology in Mauritius and India. In his most recent research he is interested in how media practices shape situations of ethnic and religious pluralism, and how they contribute to the non-deliberative and everyday dimensions of citizenship. Patrick Eisenlohr’s publications include Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius (University of California Press, 2006), and a range of articles on language, nationalism, and diaspora, as well as religious pluralism, secularism, and media.
Ayala Fader received her PhD from New York University and is now Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Fordham University, where she teaches courses on religion, gender, language, cities and childhood. Her book, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (2009) won a National Jewish Book Award, a New York City Book Award and a “highly commended” citation from the Clifford Geertz Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Ayala has published numerous articles on Hasidic language socialization, Yiddish-English bilingualism and literacy, the politics of Jewish ethnography, as well as spirituality and neoliberalism in an Upper West Side synagogue. She has received many fellowships in support of her work, including from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and most recently the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ayala is currently conducting research on struggles over the Internet among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and secular North American Jewish debates over Israel.
Marie Gillespie is Professor of Sociology at The Open University and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. She researches diaspora and national media cultures (India and Middle East) comparatively and historically. Recent projects include an exploration of the new politics of security via a collaborative ethnography of transnational news cultures in British Muslim households in eight UK cities, a national survey with the BBC on the changing face of British humour, ethnic jokes and comedy, and a large-scale study of the BBC World Service as a multi-diasporic institution. Marie was recently awarded an AHRC Public Policy Fellowship to develop research on the interface between international broadcasting and social media, specifically in relation to the BBC Arabic Services during which issues of religion and the sacred are being examined.
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb is a Jim Joseph Fellow and PhD Candidate in Education and Jewish Studies at NYU, specializing in Digital Media and Games for Learning. He has worked in the fields of internet software development and writing for film and television. Gottlieb is the Founder and Director of ConverJent : Seriously Fun Games for Jewish Learning (www.converjent.org) incubated at Clal in New York and co-founder of the Shir HaMa’alot minyan (prayer community) in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. He is a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Writers Guild of America, West, the International Game Developers Association, and is a HASTAC Scholar. He is currently designing a mobile game/simulation for teaching Jewish history in New York funded by The Covenant Foundation. He tweets @yobgorgle and @converjent and blogs at www.mysticalcreative.com
Sam Han is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is author of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2011), Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and editor (with Daniel Chaffee) of The Race of Time: A Charles Lemert Reader (Paradigm, 2009). He can be found at sam-han.org.
David Herbert is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Agder, Norway, where he teaches on the PhD program in Religion, Ethics and Society. He is author of Religion and Civil Society (Ashgate, 2003) and Creating Community Cohesion: Religion, Media and the Future of Multiculturalism in Europe (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming), and co-editor (with Marie Gillespie) of the Religion and Media special issue of European Journal of Cultural Studies (Dec 2011) and (with Marie Gillespie and Anita Greenhill) of Religion, Spirituality and Social Media (de Gruyter, forthcoming).
Charles Hirschkind is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. In his recent book, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006), he explores how a popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon—has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. He is also the co-editor (with David Scott) of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad an his Interlocutors (2005). Other publications include “Cultures of Death: Religion, Media, Bioethics” (Social Text 2008), “Is There a Secular Body?” (Cultural Anthropology 2011), Experiments in Online Devotion: The Youtube Khutba (Int’l J. of Middle East Studies 2012). His current project is based in southern Spain and explores some of the different ways in which Europe’s Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe’s Christian civilizational identity.
Steve Knowles is Lecturer in Religion and Popular Culture at the University of Chester, UK. His research interests include contemporary apocalyptic movements, the interface between religion and popular music and religion and the Internet. He is the author of Beyond Evangelicalism: The Theological Methodology of Stanley J Grenz (2010), and co-editor of Transforming Exclusion (2011).
Gordon Lynch is Michael Ramsey Professor in Modern Theology at the University of Kent and writes primarily on the cultural study of religion and the sacred. He has previously served as co-chair of the Media, Religion and Culture Group within the American Academy of Religion and Chair of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion study group. He is the author of The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach (Oxford University Press, 2012) and On the Sacred (Acumen, forthcoming).
Jolyon Mitchell is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI). Prior to this he worked as a producer and journalist with BBC World Service. His books include: Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: the Role of Religion and Media (Routledge, 2012); and Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture (co-editor Sophia Marriage), Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader (co-editor with Gordon Lynch), and Religion and the News (with Owen Gower).
Yasmin Moll is a PhD candidate in anthropology at New York University. Her dissertation research, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Egypt, focuses on the intersections of new media technologies, visual culture, and religious belief and practice, asking what does it mean to “produce Islam” (both as a media form and in the broader social sense) in a revolutionary context.
Sean O’Callaghan is a lecturer at the University of Lancaster, in the North-west of England. He is a theologian whose initial work in Christology and Missiology has led him further afield in his research to explore Western re-enchantment, occulture, the New Age, emerging cyberspiritualities, millennial movements , violent new religious movements and hyper-real spiritualities. He is extremely interested in the interface between secularization and sacralization in the West and, in particular, the way in which popular culture can be viewed as a vehicle for sacralisation.
Stephen Pihlaja is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. His thesis focuses on the dynamic use of metaphor in interaction between Evangelical Christians and atheists on YouTube. His research interests include metaphor, computer-mediated communication/discourse, and inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue.
Elizabeth Poole is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of Media Communications and Culture at Keele University. She specialises in the area of race and representation, in particular Muslims and the News. Elizabeth has significant postgraduate teaching experience and published widely in the area of Muslim representation including: Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims (2002, I B Tauris) Muslims and the News Media (Editor with John E Richardson, 2006). She has recently concluded two research projects ‘Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred’ with Professor Kim Knott (Lancaster) and ‘Muslims in the European Mediascape’ with Dr Siobhan Holohan at Keele.
Jone Salomonsen is Professor of Feminist Theology, Gender and Religion at the University of Oslo, Norway. She teaches contemporary religion, ritual, gender and feminist theology and has specialised in Christian, (Neo)Pagan and Traditional forms of religiosity, including their interfaces. She is trained both as theologian and anthropologist and wrote her PhD on contemporary Pagan women’s religiosity and ritualizing in San Francisco, published by Routledge as Enchanted Feminism. The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco in 2002. In her post-doctoral period she specialized further in ritual studies and studied emerging new rites of Christian confirmation in one American and two Norwegian congregations. From 2007-2010 she chaired the bilateral “Broken Women, Healing Traditions? Indigenous Resources for Gender Critique and Social-Religious Transformation in South Africa” project, writing on black women’s ritual responses to the Aids crisis in a South African township. Salomonsen is active in the AAR and was a member of the steering committee for the “Ritual Studies Group” 2000-08, and is presently co-chairing the “Contemporary Pagan Studies”.
Emilio Spadola (Ph.D., Anthropology, Columbia University) has been Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, since 2008. His teaching and research interests circle around religion, ethics, communication and technology in the Muslim World. Emilio’s most recent article, “Forgive Me Friend: Mohammed and Ibrahim,” in Anthropological Quarterly examines forgiveness as a theme in ethnographic fieldwork, including his own. His historical ethnography of religion, nation, and communication in urban Morocco, titled The Calls of Islam, will be published by Indiana University Press.
Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote an op/ed at the Washington Post explaining the complex nature of social media in revolutions and riots, such as those in Egypt and in London, and also a column for the Post’s Sunday Outlook section on the 5 Myths of Social Media. Additionally, he has written multiple front page articles for the Huffington Post, including a piece on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post. He has had his work featured on the front page of the UCLA and USC websites. Recent public outreach has built on his response in the New Yorker (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers, pragmatically studying their strengths and limitations, who were involved in recent revolutions in Egypt and Kyrgyzstan, as discussed in a recent NPR interview. He has also collaborated with non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. His work has impacted contemporary understandings of media studies, anthropology and sociology, design, and economic and political development studies. He has given several major invited talks, including recently at LIFT in 2009 (http://vimeo.com/5520100). He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University.
Paul-Francois Tremlett is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at The Open University. His interests include social theory, secularism, cognitive theory and space and place. He has conducted ethnographic research in the Philippines and Taiwan and, more recently, in London on Occupy London. He has published articles in NUMEN, Culture and Religion,Anthropology Today, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and Fieldwork in Religion and is the author of Levi-Strauss on Religion: The Structuring Mind (Equinox), Religion and the Discourse on Modernity (Continuum) and co-edited Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan (Routledge). He can be contacted at p.f.tremlett@open.ac.uk.
Rachel Wagner is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. She has published numerous chapters and articles on the intersection between religion and media, with a particular interest in religion and video games. Her first book, Godwired: Religion Ritual and Virtual Reality (Routledge 2012), considers the complexities of wired religion, asking to what extent virtual reality may be functioning as a proxy for traditional forms of religious imagination. She currently serves as co-chair of the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion.
Deborah Whitehead is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and faculty participant in the “Finding Religion in the Media” Project with CU’s Center for Religion, Media, and Culture. Her research focuses on issues of gender, narrative, identity, and interpretation in Christianity and U.S. popular culture. She is currently finishing her first book on American pragmatism and cultural hermeneutics, as well as working on a current project on U.S. evangelicals’ uses of new media. She is also co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Women and Religion Section.
John Zavos is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include Religious Traditions in Modern South Asia (Routledge 2011 – co-authored with Jacqueline Suthren Hirst), Public Hinduisms (Sage 2012 – principal editor), and several articles on Hinduism and Hindu organisations in the UK. He has worked extensively on the Hindu nationalist movement and is the author ofThe Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (Oxford University Press 2000). He has been the editor of the journal Contemporary South Asia since 2008.