Stanford University
Showing 1-10 of 51 Results
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Hongmin Ahn
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2026
BioHongmin Ahn is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he studies modern Korean and Japanese religions. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he connects religion, history, and anthropology by examining how the memories of colonization, war, and national division have shaped the lives of Korean religious communities, both in Korea and in diaspora (most prominently Japan).
Unified by an underlying focus on the body — one living, one dead — his research interests stretch across two seemingly disparate areas. The first turns to the living body in its most kinetic, yet monotonous, devotional form: prostration. He examines the emergence of prostration as a popular practice — often performed in sets of 108, 1,080, and 3,000 — in modern South Korea, asking how this bodily devotion rose to prominence as a means of coping with contemporary challenges that lay members face. Focused on sensorial, emotional, and spatial experience, he looks at how lay practitioners construct selfhood and subjectivity through this repetitive corporeal movement.
The second turns to the dead body: the remains of Koreans who died in Japan during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Unfolding the layered historical traumas left by the Japanese Empire, he explores the contested belonging of these bodies (both physical and spiritual) between the unwelcoming hostland and the divided homeland. He examines three types of posthumous care extended to them: ethnic care by fellow Korean religious communities, civic care by Japanese faith communities, and lastly, what he terms "violent care" by nationalistic Shinto institutions, most prominently Yasukuni Shrine.
Before Stanford, Hongmin was an IAFOR Global Fellow at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), The University of Osaka, and completed a year of Japanese-language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama. He holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts in the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions from Bard College. -
Anna Bigelow
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
BioAnna Bigelow is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She received her MA from Columbia University (1995) and PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara (2004) with a focus on South Asian Islam. Her book, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community. Bigelow's current projects include a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey and an edited volume on material objects in Islamic cultures.
