Hans Steinmüller is a specialist in the anthropology of China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in the Enshi region of Hubei Province in central China, focusing on family, work, ritual, and the local state. The main object of his research are the ethics of everyday life in rural China, but he has also written on topics such as gambling, rural development, and Chinese geomancy (fengshui). Recently he has started a new research project about militarism among the Wa people at the China-Burma border.
Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. His work is centrally concerned with the study of Asia‘s Muslim societies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, as well as with diasporic communities from this region in the Gulf, Eastern Europe, and China. He is the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Northern Pakistan (Cambridge, 2005), and Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (Oxford, 2015).
Sana Ghazi is a PhD student in the Religious Diversity department. She studied for a BA degree in Sociology at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and an MA in International Relations from the University of Warwick, UK.
Irfan Ahmad is a Senior Research Fellow working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Terrorism in Question: Toward An Anthropological Approach. Until January 2017, he was Associate Professor of Political Anthropology at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. Author of Islamism and Democracy in India (Princeton University Press, 2009), short-listed for the 2011 ICAS Book Prize for the best study in the field of Social Sciences, his second book Religion As Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace is forthcoming in 2017 from the University of North Carolina Press. Religion As Critique enunciates the ethnic foundation of the Enlightenment to ethnographically draft an alternative genealogy of critique in Islamicate traditions of south Asia. Ahmad is founding Co-Editor of Journal of Religious and Political Practice (Taylor & Francis). With Natalie Doyle, he co-edited (Il)liberal Europe: Islamophobia, Modernity and Radicalization (Routledge, 2017) and is currently co-editing (with Pralay Kanungo, Leiden University/JNU) a volume on the 2014 Indian elections.
Tzu-Lung Chiu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. In 2016 she received a Ph.D.at Ghent University, Belgium. In her dissertation, Contemporary Buddhist Nunneries in Taiwan and Mainland China: A Study of Vinaya Practices, she explored Chinese Mahāyāna nuns’ perceptions of how they interpret and practice vinaya rules in the contemporary contexts of Taiwan and Mainland China.
Mayfair Yang received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley. She has been a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at UC Santa Barbara, and in Religious Studies Department and East Asian Studies Department at the same university. She was Director of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia, and has held visiting scholar or fellowship positions at University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Beijing and Fudan Universities in China, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is the author of Gifts, Favors, & Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China, and editor of Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernities & State Formation and Places of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Her forthcoming book is: Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy & Indigenous Civil Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press). She is also working on a second, more theoretical book on Wenzhou religiosity.