Angela Zito is the author of Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China; DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1989 and currently teaches anthropology and history of Chinese culture and religions at NYU, where she has directed the Religious Studies Program off and on for the past fifteen years and co-founded and co-directed the Center for Religion and Media. Her empirical work is based in China, ranging from the historical (18th century ritual life) to the creation of new forms of personal value in the urban spaces of Beijing and Shanghai.  Her span of interest is held together through her study of bodies in sensory performances and the ways that we mediate those performances in social life in many different material forms, both everyday and artistically marked, from getting together in parks to making film and avant garde art. Zito’s research interests include Cultural history/historical anthropology; critical theories of religion; religions of China; filaility in China; religion and media; history and anthropology of embodiment; gender; performance and subjectivity; and documentary film.

Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic and political modernities. Her book Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexualities and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema, examines how Buddhist-coded anachronisms of haunting figure struggles over sexuality, personhood, and notions of collectivity in contemporary Thai cinema. In her current research project, Digital Futures, Fuhrmann focuses on new media and how the study of the digital allows for a perspective on the political public sphere that transcends commonplace distinctions of liberalism and illiberalism. This project intersects with her interests in the transformation of cities in contemporary Southeast and East Asia. Fuhrmann’s recent writing has appeared in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Diogenes, Oriens Extremus, and positions: asia critique. Complementing her academic work, she also engages in cultural programming and works in the curatorial team of the Asian Film Festival Berlin. In Fall 2016, she is a visiting scholar at the Thai Studies Centre, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, with support from Cornell University.

Nirmala S. Salgado is the author of Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice: In Search of the Female Renunciant, which investigates narratives on female renunciation in Buddhism in relation to questions about “freedom,” “empowerment,” “resistance” and the construction of renunciant identity in colonialist and liberal feminist discourse.  She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 1992 and currently teaches in the Department of Religion at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL.  Salgado is a 2014 recipient of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collaborative Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, which has supported her most recent research project that focuses on the cultivation of moral practices, monastic discipline, and communal cohesion at nunnery training-schools and meditation centers in Sri Lanka.  Her research interests include Contemporary Theravada Buddhism, Buddhism in America, Gender and Religion, and Postcolonialism.