Interviews and meetings upon appointment. Please take contact by e-mail, not phone.
Pronouns: he/him
Research interests
I study religion, culture, and nature in modern and contemporary Asia, with a primary focus on Japan and Vietnam. My research interests include the following:
- Religion and ecology
- Nature conservation, multispecies relations, and environmental activism
- Secularisation and sacralisation
- Spatial and ritual theory in the study of religion
- Heritage-making and tourism
- Corporate religion
- Modern and contemporary Shinto
- Vietnamese ritual traditions
- Okinawan and Ainu ritual traditions
- Christianity in Asia
- Buddhism and local deities
- Goddess worship in East Asia
From 2019 to 2025, I am the leader of a comparative research project on cetacean worship and environmental change in maritime East Asia, titled Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia (WhoP). For this project, I was awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). WhoP studies relations between humans and aquatic mammals in maritime regions of East Asia, focusing on popular ritual practices and beliefs. We look at notions of whales, dolphins and other marine mammals as embodiments of divine power, at related festivals and other ritual traditions, and at nature conservation initiatives concerned with protecting these animals. Through a combination of historical and ethnographic research, we hope to gain insight into responses to socio-economic and environmental change in Asian coastal communities.
I am the author of the monograph Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (Bloomsbury 2017), and the co-editor of Festivals in Asia: Patronage, Play, and Piety (special issue of Religion, 2023), Sacred Heritage in Japan (Routledge 2020), and Formations of the Secular in Japan (special issue of Japan Review, 2017). In addition, I have written a number of articles and book chapters on whale rituals, religious heritage-making, corporate religion, Okinawan sacred groves, modern and contemporary Shinto, sacred space, secularisation, Japanese Christianity, and religion in Vietnam.
I am currently working on four book projects: my second monograph, Stranded Gods: Whales, Rituals, and Environmental Change in Japan and Vietnam; the edited volume Water Powers: Divine Animals of the Asia-Pacific (with Florence Durney and Lidsey DeWitt Prat); the co-authored book Animating Action (with Yulia Frumer and Jolyon Thomas); and the introductory textbook Shinto: A Student's Introduction (with Ernils Larsson and Mark Teeuwen). In addition, I am developing a new research project on transnational goddess worship, ritual transformations, and human-nature relations in East and Southeast Asia.
Educational background
- PhD, University of Oslo, 2014
- MA Japanese Religions, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2008
- BA Japanese Language and Culture, Leiden University, 2007
- BA World Religions, Leiden University, 2007