Gwendolyn Gillson researches at the intersection of anthropology of religion, East Asian studies and gender studies. Her work at Illinois College broadly examines how women craft their experiences of Buddhism to deal with the loneliness endemic to the dissolution of traditional Japanese social structures brought about by urbanization and globalization.

Noam Sienna is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He is a scholar of Jewish culture and history, a Jewish educator and a Hebrew calligrapher and book artist. His academic work has focused on Jewish communities in the Islamic world, from the Middle Ages to the present, including their domestic practices.

Patricia Cecil is a specialist curator at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work focuses on enhancing insight into the ways faith and religion shaped and were shaped by World War I and its aftermath. 

Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist covering religion in America. He has written about religious life during and in response to the pandemic, including a profile of Clay Clark, the frontman of a prophecy-and-politics roadshow; New Age author Christiane Northrup’s conspiracy makeover; a faith-healing TikToker whose fandom grew during lockdown months; and a Pentecostal church that […]

Paul Christopher Johnson is professor of history at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on religious practices, diaspora religions and the practice of secrecy in the Americas, especially in Brazil and the Caribbean.

Gerry Bowler teaches at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Santa Claus: A Biography and The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, and the co-author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century. He has published works on topics ranging from Renaissance monarchy and Bloody Mary to the Simpsons, the Spice Girls and the history of […]

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, where she teaches classes on religion and masculinity, Catholics in the Americas, urban religion and religions of Latin America. She is an ethnographer, and her research focuses on material culture, contemporary Catholicism, and gender and embodiment.

Matthew Hayes is the librarian for Japanese studies and Asian American studies at Duke University. He is co-creator of the website “Collecting Religion.”

James S. Bielo is associate professor in the department of religious studies at Northwestern University. He specializes in the anthropological study of religion, Christianity, American religion and the study of material religion.