'Journey to the South: Buddhist Connections across the South China Sea' - the keynote lecture given by Jack Meng-Tat Chia (Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies, National University of Singapore) at the April 2023 UC Berkeley-UCLA CSEAS Conference on Networks and Knowledge in Southeast Asia has been posted to the CSEAS YouTube channel.
Jack Meng-Tat Chia (Ph.D., Cornell University) is a historian of religion whose research focuses on Buddhism and Chinese popular religion. He specializes in Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia and has broader research interests in migration, diasporas, transnationalism, pilgrimage, and religious diplomacy. He is the author of Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Friedrich Weller Prize. He is currently working on two book projects: ‘Sisters in Dharma: A Buddhist Feminist in Postcolonial Indonesia’, and ‘Diplomatic Dharma: Buddhist Diplomacy in Modern Asia’, which is supported by the 2020 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship awarded by the Social Science Research Council Singapore. In 2022 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.