Leah Hott served as a Research Assistant for the World Religions and Spirituality Project in 2013. She is co-author of the Our Lady of Clearwater and Unified Buddhist Church profiles.

Lee Gilmore specializes in the study of ritual and new religious movements. The author of Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press, 2010), she also co-edited AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press, 2005). She currently teaches online for San José State University and previously taught at California State University, Northridge.  She completed her PhD at the Graduate Theological Union in Cultural & Historical Studies of Religions in 2005.

Levi McLaughlin is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2009 after previous study at the University of Tokyo, and he holds a B.A. and M.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. He has worked as a research assistant at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo and was a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Iowa. Articles and book chapters by Levi appear in English and Japanese in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Religion Compass, Seka, the Social Science Japan Journal, and other publications. Levi is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Sōka Gakkai: Buddhism and Romantic Heroism in Modern Japan, and he is co-editor of the collected volume Kōmeitō: Politics and Religion in Japan that is forthcoming from the University of California at Berkeley’s East Asian Studies monograph series.

Lola Williamson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Peace Studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. Williamson received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, where she focused on the religions and languages of South Asia. Williamson researches different forms of Hinduism in the United States with an emphasis on meditation and yoga groups. Among her publications are Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (New York University Press, 2010) and, co-edited with Ann Gleig, Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism (forthcoming, State University of New York Press, November 2013). A complete publication list can be found at http://modernyogaresearch.org/

Magnus Lundberg is Professor of Church and Mission Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden, specializing in World Christianity and Interreligious Studies. He earned a Dr. Theol. degree in Mission Studies at Lund University and is a trained archivist. He has been guest professor at the Colegio de Michoacán and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Lundberg’s research is focused on the history of the church in colonial Spanish America. Apart from a large number of articles in English, Spanish and Swedish, he has published three books. The first is Unification and Conflict: The Church Politics of Alonso de Montufar OP, Archbishop of Mexico, 1554-1572   (2002) which later was translated into Spanish. The second is C hurch Life Between the Metropolitan and the Local: Parishes, Parishioners and Parish Priests in Seventeenth-Century Mexico   (2011) and the latest is Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative women’s role in the mission in colonial Latin America (2015). Together with David Westerlund he has edited a general introduction to Latin American religions, Religion i Latinamerika (2013). Other areas of interest are post-Vatican II Catholic dissenter groups and Marian apparitions, the history of mission studies and archival matters.

Margaret M. Poloma, Ph.D. (Case Western Reserve University, 1970) has written extensively about religious experience in contemporary American society, including pioneering studies of prayer, Pentecostalism, contemporary revivals and divine healing. Much of this work has focused on diverse pentecostal spiritualities (i.e., denominational Pentecostal, charismatic, Third Wave, neo-pentecostal, etc.), as reported in Charismatic Movement; The Assemblies of God at the Crossroad; Main Street Mystics; Blood and Fire (with Ralph W. Hood); and The Assemblies of God (with John C. Green)]. Her pioneering research on prayer (c.f., Varieties of Prayer with George H. Gallup Jr.) has served as a bridge between Pentecostal spirituality and common spiritual experiences of American Christians through data collected in two national surveys (1989 and 2009). Through the use of both qualitative and quantitative measures to explore the experiential dimension of religion, Poloma was able to mine research nuggets that suggested religious experience does indeed impact human behaviour. Most recently she has collaborated with some twenty other colleagues in the John Templeton Foundation-sponsored Flame of Love Project ( www.godlyloveproject.org ) to develop a model of “Godly Love” that demonstrates the dynamic process in which experiences of the divine contribute to a better understanding human benevolence. Major findings from this research are found in Matthew T. Lee, Margaret M. Poloma, and Stephen G. Post, The Heart of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Marie W. Dallam is Assistant Professor of American Religion and Culture at the Honors College of the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on people and groups that have become religious and cultural outsiders in the United States, whether by choice or by default. This theme acts as a starting point in her research and also gives shape to the courses she teaches. She has published in journals including Studies in Popular Culture and Nova Religio. Her first book, Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (2007) is an intellectual history of the United House of Prayer for All People under its founding bishop. Her forthcoming second book is a co-edited volume titled The Way of Food: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (2014). Her current research project focuses on Cowboy Churches of Oklahoma and Texas. Dallam is an active member of the American Academy of Religion, presently serving as chairperson of the New Religious Movements Group.

Marion Goldman has studied cults and new religious movements for three decades.

Her 1999 book, Passionate Journeys, explores the lives of high achievers who followed Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to central Oregon. It was the basis for a recent Oregon Public Broadcasting special:   http://www.opb.org/programs/oregonexperience/programs/41-Rajneeshpuram

The American Soul Rush, published in 2012, examines how many popular practices such as  yoga, meditation, holistic healing, and humanistic psychology were Americanized and popularized at Esalen Institute, a spiritual retreat on the California coast.

She is collaborating on a book with Susanna Hecht, American Utopias andContested Visions. Her other recent research deals with the dynamic relationships between faith and food. She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Oregon and the Scholar in Residence at the Portland Center for Public Humanities.

Mark Sedgwick is Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Bergen, Norway, where he worked on the history of Sufism in the pre-modern and early modern periods, and taught for almost twenty years at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. His research focuses on Islam in the Muslim world and the West, with an emphasis on the period after 1800 and on Sufism. He also works on terrorism, Islam in Europe, and other topics. His most recent book is Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford 2017), and his most recent edited volume is Global Sufism: Boundaries, Structures, and Politics​ (Hurst 2019, edited with Francesco Piraino). His other books include Islam & Muslims: A Guide to Diverse Experience in a Modern World (Nicholas Brealey 2006), Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004) and Sufism: The Essentials (American University in Cairo Press, 2000). 

MARTHA BRADLEY-EVANS

Dr. Martha Bradley-Evans is a professor in the College of Architecture + Planning who teaches history and theory classes. Between 2002 and 2011, Dr. Bradley served as the Dean of the Honors College and in July 2011 became the Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Undergraduate Studies. An award winning teacher, Bradley is the recipient of the University of Utah Distinguished Teaching Award, the University Professorship, the Student Choice Excellence in Teaching Award, the Bennion Center Service Learning Professorship, the Park Fellowship and the Borchard Fellowship. In 2008, she received the Honorary AIA Award from AIA Utah. She is the vice chair of the Utah State Board of History and is Chair of the Utah Heritage Foundation.

Her books include: Kidnapped from that Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists; The Four Zinas: Mothers and Daughters on the Frontier; and Pedastals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority and Equal Rights.