C Ontributors

C ONTRIBUTORS Goh Beng Lan (PhD, Anthropology, Monash University) is associ- ate professor and department head of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of Modern Dreams: An Inquiry into Power, Cultural Production, and the Cityscape in Contemporary Urban Penang, Malaysia (Cornell, 2002). She edited Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011) and co-edited Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia: Rethinking Academic, Social and Cultural Linkages (ISEAS, 2004). Susan M. Darlington is professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Hampshire College, Massachusetts. Her research, based on extensive fieldwork in Thailand, examines the work of Buddhist monks engaged in rural development, environmental conservation, and other forms of social activism. She is the author of The Ordination of a Tree: The Thai Buddhist Environmental Movement (State University of New York Press, 2012). The broader questions that she addresses in her research and teaching include understanding the changing social, political, and historical contexts of religion, environmentalism, and human rights, and the creative use of ritual for social change. Mahinda Deegalle is reader in Religious Studies and Ethics at School of Humanities and Cultural Industries at Bath Spa University, United Kingdom. Currently, he is the NEH Professor of Humanities at Colgate University, New York. He serves in the managing com- mittee of Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions. He is the author of Popularizing Buddhism: Preaching as Performance in Sri Lanka (State University of New York Press, 2006), the editor of Dharma to the UK: A Centennial Celebration of Buddhist Legacy (World Buddhist Foundation, 2008), Buddhism, Conflict and Violence in Modern Sri Lanka (Routledge, 2006), and the coeditor of Pali Buddhism (Curzon, 1996). He has held Numata Visiting Professorship in Buddhist Studies at McGill University, Canada. As a 264 C ONTRIBUTORS postdoctoral research fellow, he has carried out research in Buddhism over three and a half years in Japan under the auspices of The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai at Kyoto University, Sophia University, Aichi Gakuin University, and International College for Advanced Buddhist Studies. He has teaching experience in Buddhism and related areas in a wide range of academic institutions in Sri Lanka, United States, Canada, and England. His current research interests include the ethics of war and monastic politics in Sri Lanka in relation to armed conflict and violence. Monica Lindberg Falk is a social anthropologist, vice director, and senior lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests include gender, Buddhism, anthropology of disaster, religious movement, and social change in Southeast Asia. Her scholarship includes extensive fieldwork in Thailand. She has published a monograph, Making Fields of Merit: Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered Orders in Thailand (NIAS Press/University of Washington Press, 2007/2008) and several articles on themes related to gender and Buddhism, socially engaged Buddhism, and Buddhism and crises. One of her current research projects is gender and Buddhism’s role in the recovery pro- cess after the 2004 tsunami catastrophe in Thailand, another of her research projects is about gender, education, and student mobility within Asia. Tilman Frasch studied South Asian History, European History, and South Asian Languages at Heidelberg University, from which he received a PhD with a thesis on the city and state of Pagan (Myanmar) in 1995. Serving as assistant professor in South Asian History at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, from 1995 to 2002, he held research fellowships in Manchester and Singapore. Since 2006, he is senior lecturer in Asian History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research areas cover premodern South and Southeast Asian history, Buddhist studies, urban history, and the history of tech- nology. Major publications include Pagan: Stadt und Staat (Stuttgart, 1996), “1456: The Making of a Buddhist Ecumene in the Bay of Bengal,” in Rila Mukherjee (ed.), Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal World before Colonialism, 383–405 (Delhi: Primus, 2011), and “Tracks in the City. Electricity and Mobility in Singapore and Rangoon, c. 1900–1930s,” Modern Asian Studies 46 (1) 2012, 97–118. He has also written the sections on Southeast Asia for an eight-volume global history from 1000 to 2000 CE (in German) recently. C ONTRIBUTORS 265 Charles F. Keyes , professor emeritus of anthropology and international studies at the University of Washington, has since the early 1960s carried out extensive research in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia on Buddhism and modernity, ethnicity, and national cultures; trans- formation of rural society; and culture and development. He has authored, edited, or coedited 15 books, monographs, or special issues of journals and published over 80 articles. His most recent published works include “‘Cosmopolitan’ Villagers and Populist Democracy in Thailand,” South East Asia Research (2012); “The Color of Politics: Thailand’s Deep Crisis of Authority,” in Michael J. Montesano, Pavin Chachavalponpun, and Aekapol Chongvilaivan (eds.), Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012). His forthcoming book to be published by Silkworm Books, tentatively entitled “From Peasant to Cosmopolitan Villagers: The Roots of Rural Populism in Northeastern Thailand,” traces the evolution of relationships between Lao-speaking rural people in northeastern Thailand and the Thai state from a millenarian upris- ing in 1902 to the electoral successes of populist parties in the first decade of the twenty-first century. He is currently working with the University of Washington Libraries on a joint project with institutions in Thailand to create a digital archive of research materials on Thailand. Pattana Kitiarsa was assistant professor in Southeast Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He wrote Mediums, Monks, and Amulets: Thai Popular Buddhism Today (Silkworm, 2012). A Thai-Isan ethnographer in diaspora since January 2004, he had a wide range of research interests, including popular Buddhism, religious commodifications, masculinity, popular culture, and transna- tional labor migration. His other publications include an edited volume, Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods (Routledge, 2008). Patrice Ladwig studied social anthropology and sociology in Edinburgh, Paris, and Muenster (1995–2002) and obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2008. He was a research assistant in an AHRC project on Buddhist death rituals at the University of Bristol and is currently research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. He works on the anthropology of Theravada Buddhism, death and funeral cultures, religion and Communist movements, and colonialism and the anthropology of the state. He is currently involved in a project that explores the relation- ship of Buddhist statecraft and non-Buddhist ethnic minorities. His 266 C ONTRIBUTORS regional focus is Laos and Thailand. He is editor (with Paul Williams) of Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and has published articles on the historical and contemporary dimensions of religion in Laos. Jonathan Mair is currently working on a book based on doctoral research on contemporary Mongolian Buddhism in Inner Mongolia. The region’s traditional brand of Mongolian-style Tibetan Buddhism, which was decimated in the Cultural Revolution, and saw a faltering revival in the 1980s, has been booming in recent years. However, the Buddhists he worked with take a pessimistic view of religious practice and knowledge—and that of monks and experts among them— because they say real expertise has been lost and cannot be replaced. His work describes the way in which this pessimism leads religious people to emphasize the cultivation of devotion and humility, and the consequences of this fideism for the possibility of religious knowledge and practice. He is planning a collaborative project on Buddhist ethics with colleagues working on Buddhism in other regions. John Amos Marston has been interested in Cambodia and Cambodian refugees since the 1980s. He completed a doctorate in anthropology at University of Washington in 1997 and since then has been a professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Center for Asian and African Studies of El Colegio de M é xico in Mexico City. He is the editor of the book Anthropology and Community in Cambodia: Reflections on the Work of May Ebihara (Monash University Press, 2011) and coeditor of the book History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). His articles have appeared in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Contemporary Buddhism, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Crossroads, Estudios de Asia y Africa, Asia Pacific, Southeast Asian Affairs, Critical Asian Studies , and numerous edited volumes. Donald M. Seekins was, until his retirement in 2010, professor of Southeast Asian studies in the College of International Studies at Meio University in Okinawa, Japan. He has done extensive research and fieldwork on society, religion, and politics in historical and contemporary Burma, and his publications

Load more