Current Team Members
Emily HERTZMAN
Emily Hertzman is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on mobilities, identities, religious practices, and politics amongst Chinese Indonesians in Borneo. She earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2017, after completing her B.A. (2001) and M.A. (2006) at the University of British Columbia. She is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto where she coordinates the Ethnography Lab. Previously, Emily Hertzman served as a Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalization Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, at the National University of Singapore (2020-2023), and before that, she held the position of Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto (2017-2019). She is co-editor of the phygital book CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (University of Hawaii Press, 2023). Her published work can be found in Global Networks, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, HAU, and Indonesia.
Natalie LANG
Dr Lang is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Religion and Globalisation Cluster and the Asian Urbanisms Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, migration, diaspora and cities. Her ethnographic research on Hindus in La Réunion deals with questions about religion, diaspora and recognition (Religion and Pride, Berghahn 2021). She currently pursues questions about religion, the city and the body based on anthropological fieldwork on Tamil religious practices in Singapore and Paris.
Erica M. LARSON
Dr Larson is a Research Fellow in the Religion & Globalisation research cluster at the Asia Research Institute. Her ethnographic research in Indonesia has focused on how schools in North Sulawesi become sites of deliberation about the ethics and politics of religious coexistence (Ethics of Belonging, University of Hawaii Press 2024). Her current research focuses on Indonesian students seeking higher education in Singapore as a “digital diaspora,” examining the ways in which social media usage is intertwined with academic aspirations, religious practice, and various forms of mobility. She is also conducting collaborative, multi-sited research in Indonesia focusing on perceptions of corruption among Indonesian youth active in religiously-based university organisations.
Carola LOREA
Carola Lorea is a Junior Professor of Religious Studies and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tubingen, Germany. Her work is focused on popular religious movements and performance traditions of subaltern groups in India, Bangladesh and the eastern Indian Ocean. She authored numerous articles on religion and society, with a focus on sound, caste, healing, and performance traditions. After her first monograph (Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman, 2016), she has worked on several collaborative projects, like CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (University of Hawaii Press, 2023), The Ethnography of Tantra (SUNY, 2023), Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North (AUP, 2024), and Special Issues like “Religion and COVID-19: Mediating Presence and Distance” (Religion 2023) and “Faith in Immunity and Structures of Trust” (Asian Medicine 2024).