Contributors
- Contributors
S. Brent Plate is a writer, editor, and part-time college professor at Hamilton College. Recent books include A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to its Senses (Beacon Press) and Religion and Film: Cinema and the Recreation of the World (Columbia University Press). His essays have appeared at Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, America, The Christian Century, and The Islamic Monthly. He is the incoming Executive Director of ARIL, and incoming Editor of CrossCurrents. More at www.sbrentplate.net.
Chijioke Azuawusiefe, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, studies religion and film, with an emphasis on Nollywood, the cinema of Nigeria. His research examines the interplay of religion, media, and culture in local and transnational contexts, especially of Africa and African Diaspora. Chijioke’s dissertation, “Nollywood and Popular Religion: Productions of Prosperity, Gender, and the Supernatural in Nigerian Cinema,” combines religious studies and cinema studies analyses to investigate the role of film in constructing the everydayness of life influenced by religion in contemporary Nigeria.
Hwasun Choe (Ph. D. in Religious Studies) is a lecturer at Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. She has been teaching “Religion and Film” and “Religion and the Arts” courses for several years and has interests in interpreting religious culture through various human activities such as film, arts, museum, architecture and travels. She also translated Wendy Doniger’s Implied Spider and Bruce Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth into Korean.
April Makgoeng her career as a professor of documentary film in the Theatre & Media Arts Department at Brigham Young University. During this time she produced and directed several award-winning films exploring religious themes. In 2006, April left academia to pursue production with National Geographic Television in Washington DC. Over a period of seven years, she produced hundreds of hours of television. A desire to study religion and media led April to USC where she is currently a doctoral student in Christian Studies. Her research interests within religion include media studies, cultural studies, and race, ethnicity and gender studies.
Minjung Noh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Temple University. Her interdisciplinary research concerns transnational Korean evangelical Christianity and its gendered missions between North America and South Korea.
Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati is a professor in the study and history of religion at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research focuses on the interaction between religion and (audio-)visual media, the role of religion in the public space, and theories and methods of comparative religion. She is a coeditor of the Journal for Religion, Film and Media and of different book series, among them Media and Religion (edited by Nomos in Baden-Baden) and Research in Contemporary Religion (edited by Vandehoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen). In this series, she coauthored the volume Religion and Difference. Contested Contemporary Issues, published in 2019.
Sharon A. Suh is professor of Buddhism at Seattle University and author of Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community (University of Washington Press, 2004); Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film (Bloomsbury Press, 2015); and Occupy This Body: A Buddhist Memoir (Sumeru Press, 2019). Her academic work explores Buddhism in Film; Buddhism, gender, and race; and traumainformed Mindfulness.
Anu Thapa is a Marion L. Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media and Communication. Her research examines the intersections between religion and technology in Hindi commercial cinema, from its inception to present. Her works have appeared in Cin’ema&Cie, Film Criticism, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
Joe Tolbert Jr. (Joe T.) is a minister, art critic, and the founder and lead cultural strategist of Art at the Intersections. He received his B.S. in Communications from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and completed his M.Div. in Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York. Joe is a sought-after facilitator and cultural strategist that works with communities and institutions to help them harness the power of art and culture through the building, implementation and evaluation of cultural strategies.
Rachel Wagner is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her first book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality...
