Sarah Luginbill is a visiting assistant professor in history and the humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio. Luginbill is interested in the intersection of museums and objects, especially religious or spiritual items. She currently researches portable Mass kits used by Catholic chaplains in the U.S. military during World Wars I and II.

Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist in Australia interested in death, Buddhism and material culture in Australia and Northeast Asia. Gould’s research spans new traditions and technologies of Buddhist death rites, the life cycle of religious materials and modern lifestyle movements.

Alina Kokoschka is a researcher in Islamic studies, specializing in the aesthetics of Islamization, with a focus on the material worlds of Islam and Arabic script in the digital space. She also has interest in the relationship between people and things as well as criticism of representations of Islam and “Islamic art.”

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.

Jessica Hughes is senior lecturer in classical studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Her research specialisms include votive offerings, classical reception and the changing religious landscape of Campania, Southern Italy.

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. 

Kaitlyn Ugoretz is an anthropologist of religion and the associate editor of publications at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, including the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Ugoretz specializes in contemporary Japanese religion, globalization, technology and media. Her digital ethnographic research focuses on the globalization of Shinto and the development of transnational online Shinto communities.

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 […]