Martin Baumann is Professor of the Study of Religions at the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences and current vice-chancellor for the advancement of research at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on Buddhists and Buddhist communities in Germany in 1993 at the University of Hannover (Germany) and received his habilitation graduation with a post-doctoral thesis on Hindu tradition in diasporic contexts in 1999 at the University of Leipzig (Germany). Since 2001, he is professor for the Study of Religions at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland). His teaching and research interests focus on immigration and religion, diaspora communities and religious pluralism, new religions, and Hindu and Buddhist traditions in the West.
Vincent Goossaert obtained his PhD at EPHE, Paris (1997), was a research fellow at CNRS from 1998 to 2012 and is now Professor of Daoism and Chinese religions at EPHE. He has served as the Deputy Director of the Societies-Religions-Secularisms Institute (GSRL, Paris) since 2004. In 2007, he was ICS Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research deals with the social history of premodern and modern Chinese religion. He has published books on Chinese temples, Anticlericalism in China, Chinese dietary taboos, the production of moral norms, and most recently, with David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011) which won the Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies in 2013.
Philip Clart is Professor of Chinese Culture and History at the University of Leipzig, Germany. His main research areas are popular religion and new religious movements in Taiwan, religious change in Taiwan and China, as well as literature and religions of the late imperial period (10th-19th c.). His monographs include Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal (University of Washington Press, 2007) and Die Religionen Chinas (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). He has edited or co-edited Religion in Modern Taiwan: Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society (University of Hawai‘i Press 2003), The People and the Dao: New Studies of Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer (Institute Monumenta Serica, 2009), and Chinese and European Perspectives on the Study of Chinese Popular Religions (Boyang Publishing, 2012).
Mette Halsko Hansen is Professor at the University of Oslo, Department of East European and Oriental Studies. She is responsible for the master programme in Chinese society and politics, and a newly started joint master in China studies with the University of Zhejiang, in cooperation with University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University.
Her research is in the field of modern Chinese society and politics, more specifically: education and youth, processes of individualization, ethnic minorities, Chinese migrations to minority areas, and most recently discourses on the environment and public participation in environmental debates. The research is based on fieldwork mainly in the provinces of Yunnan, Gansu, Zhejiang, and Fujian.
