Jack Meng-Tat Chia

Jack Meng-Tat Chia was a National University of Singapore-Overseas Postdoctoral Fellow. He is a historian of religions who studies Buddhism and Chinese popular religion in maritime Southeast Asia, with a focus on the transregional circulation of people, ideas and resources. Born and raised in Singapore, he received his BA (Hons) and MA from the National University of Singapore, his second MA from Harvard University, where he was a Harvard-Yenching Scholar, and his PhD from Cornell University. He is currently working on his book manuscript tentatively titled “Diaspora’s Dharma: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea.” This book seeks to contribute to our understanding of the history of Buddhism in inter-Asian contexts and the intersections between national and Buddhist institutional projects in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Chia is the co-editor of Living with Myths in Singapore (2017) and has published articles in journals such as Asian Ethnology, China Quarterly, Dongnanya yanjiu, Journal of Chinese Religions, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, Material Religion, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and SOJOURN. His next project is entitled “Beyond the Borobudur: Buddhism in Postcolonial Indonesia.” It explores the history and development of Buddhism in the world’s largest Muslim country since 1945