Kalpesh Bhatt
Assistant Professor, Asian Religions
University of Mary Washington
Kalpesh Bhatt’s interdisciplinary research synthesizes the anthropology of religion, textual studies, and positive psychology, exploring how modern interpretations of Hindu texts and practices interact with secular conditions and everyday life. His work examines agency, autonomy, religious pluralism, and communal tensions in Hindu communities across North America, the UK, and India. He is particularly interested in lived Hinduism, Hindu-Christian studies, and contemplative traditions. Committed to making academic research more accessible, Kalpesh employs visual anthropology to enhance public understanding of religion.
Kalpesh earned his PhD from the University of Toronto, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard, and degrees in Physics and Computer Science from BITS Pilani. His diverse interests in religion, science, and art have led him to direct several creative productions, including the first IMAX film on India, as well as state-of-the-art multimedia shows. Notably, he created a grand watershow based on an ancient story from the Upaniṣads, highlighting the interplay between religion and technology, tradition and modernity.
Stephen Chen directs the Culture, Family, and Development Lab and teaches courses in Asian American Psychology, Cultural Psychology, and Culture and Emotion. His research examines how cultural and family processes interact to influence development and mental health across the lifespan. One of his current projects examines how Asian American parents reconcile cultural scripts for success with religious-spiritual values and beliefs; and how they discuss these tensions with their adolescent-age children.
Beiyin Deng
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia
Deng is an anthropologist of religion specializing in contemporary Buddhist material culture and economy, focusing particularly on the role of religious material and labor in the contexts of Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar, transnational Buddhism between China and Southeast Asia, and Myanmar Buddhist Diaspora in the U.S. Her current book project, Seeking Magnificence: Material, Labor, and Buddhist Economy across Myanmar-China Borders, investigates contemporary Buddhist craftsmanship in the trade of marble Buddhist images across the Myanmar-China border that transcends conventional academic boundaries between Southeast and East Asia as well as Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Her previous public scholarship mainly involves community engagement and education outreach based on her project “Food, Merit, and Community Building: Burmese Buddhist Diasporas in Marshalltown, IA” when she was a Visiting Instructor at Grinnell College.
Victoria Huynh
PhD Candidate, Ethnic Studies
University of California Berkeley
Victoria (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies, focusing on critical refugee studies, carceral studies, and the Southeast Asian diaspora. Her dissertation examines how Southeast Asian post-war refugees came to be captured in the prison to deportation pipeline, and how they have fought for their freedom since. She’s published a few essays and short articles on these topics, which can be found at victoriaky.com.
Ki-Eun Jang
Assistant Professor, Bible in Global Cultures, Department of Theology
Fordham University
Ki-Eun Jang is also an affiliate faculty member and executive board member of the Asian American Studies program at Fordham. With an interest in advancing socially engaged humanities at the intersection of the literary history of the Hebrew Bible, the history of ideas of identities and identifications, and transnational migration and ethnic studies (with a focus on Asian American Studies), her research engages the social world of ancient West Asia, which produced the Hebrew Bible, and the intellectual legacy of modernity that shapes the ways in which the modern humanities conceived of the received materials from the past. She is currently developing a book project, Becoming Canaanites, which traces and interrogates the competing historical, legal, literary-poetic, and religio-political constructions and representations of Canaanite identities from the Hebrew Bible to modern reconfigurations. Her public-facing scholarship includes “Debates About Migration Have Never Been Simple—Just Look at the Hebrew Bible,” published in The Conversation.
Elaine Lai obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2024, with a specialty in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on the Great Perfection in Tibet. Elaine’s recent research explores the relationship between Buddhist literature and time, specifically, how form and content interplay to cultivate more compassionate temporal realities. Recently, Elaine has also worked as a consultant and researcher for FX/Disney in the conceptualization and world-building of an original streamed series set in a pan-Asian city.
Jesse Lee
Postdoctoral Research Associate, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Washington University in St. Louis
Jesse J. Lee is a postdoctoral research associate for the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He researches the intersection of religion, race, and American law, especially in the context of Asian American religious history. His first book project explores the legal history of the Buddhist Churches of America, demonstrating how religio-racial minorities utilized the protections and privileges afforded to religion and religious corporations in American law.
Jerry Z. Park’s expertise is in the sociology of religion and race & ethnicity with a specific focus on Asian Americans. He earned his Ph.D at the University of Notre Dame. He has published 49 research journal articles and chapters to date, and is currently involved in several studies centering on Asian American socio-political attitudes and civic participation as well as minority-dominant Christian communities. He will serve as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion this August (2025).
Public scholarship
Park, Jerry Z. 2023. “Everyday Hinduism: Religion in Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever.” (Part of “Religion, Race, and Never Have I Ever: A Roundtable on Season Four”). The Anxious Bench. Retrieved.
Park, Jerry Z. 2023. “Making Our AAPI Heritage Visible.” Christians for Social Action. Retrieved.
Park, Jerry Z. 2023. “Refashioning the Frames of American Religion Research.” The Immanent Frame. Retrieved.
Nura A. Sediqe’s work focuses on the political behavior and attitudes of racialized minorities. In particular, she examines how racialized minorities draw on communal religious beliefs as a resource for political mobilization. She recently completed a manuscript, Beliefs that Bind, focusing on the case of American Muslims’ political engagement. She has published in venues such as California Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, Politics & Gender, and in public venues like BBC News and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. She has also discussed her insights in broadcast venues such as PBS Newshour, The Associated Press, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Nura is a proud first-generation Afghan woman and continues advocacy work within the Afghan diasporic community.
Wonchul Shin
Catherine of Siena Teaching Fellow
Villanova University
Wonchul Shin (Ph.D., Emory University) is Catherine of Siena Teaching Fellow at Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA. His research focuses on examining interlocking forms of violence against marginalized communities and reconstructing theological/religious discourses for empowering the marginalized as agents of peace and justice. He has published articles and reviews in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Theology Today, and Interpretation. He is working on his public research projects on (1) developing Pan-Asian theological resources for public worship against anti-Asian violence (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship’s teacher-scholar grant), (2) exploring Asian/Korean immigrant churches’ sanctuary movement in North America (Villanova University’s UNITAS research grant), and (3) developing liturgical practices for shaping Korean American children’s appreciation of ecology and their commitment to environmental justice (Lilly Endowment-funded Children, Liturgy, Ecology, and Renewal Project).
Justin Tse
Assistant Professor, Religion and Culture Singapore Management University
Justin Tse is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture (Education) at Singapore Management University’s College of Integrative Studies. He is author of Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific Rim (Notre Dame Press, 2024) and co-editor of the Springer Handbook of Geographies of Religion (2025). In 2022, he was invited by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Singapore to participate in DialogueSpaceSG, a youth forum for interreligious dialogue on Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti. He has also written for Patheos Catholic and The Immanent Frame and has been interviewed numerous times on WBEZ Worldview, Roundhouse Radio in Vancouver, the South China Morning Post, and the Vancouver Sun, usually on his research on transpacific migration, Hong Kong religion, and how theologies are grounded in secular space.
Perdian Tumanan is a PhD candidate in Christian Ethics and Constructive Theology at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He holds a Master of Divinity from the South-East Asia Bible Seminary in Indonesia and a Master of Theology and Peace Studies from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, IN.
Before pursuing his advanced theological studies in the United States, he served in various capacities, including as an associate pastor, lecturer in Religion, Ethics, and Peacebuilding, and a faith and culture advisor for World Vision Indonesia. He is also actively engaged in interfaith dialogue as the co-founder of the Indonesia Peacebuilding Institute. This organization connects young religious scholars and leaders in Indonesia and provides interfaith peace education for students.
His commitment to public scholarship is evident in his contributions to The Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s leading English-language newspaper, where he has published three op-ed articles, as well as several opinion pieces in Bahasa Indonesia for local newspapers. Additionally, he serves as the co-director of Theovlogy, an online theological and religious education platform that predates the pandemic and has attracted thousands of viewers across denominational and religious affiliations. Since its inception, Theovlogy has produced nearly 300 interview videos featuring scholars not only from Indonesia and the Christian tradition but also from diverse religious and theological backgrounds across Australia, Asia, Europe, the United States, and Canada. Through this platform, he seeks to foster a culture of understanding and build bridges necessary for cultivating a lasting culture of peace.