People

ALP ARAT
Dr Alp Arat, Committee Member Sociology of Religion Study Group – British Sociological Association.
Research interests: secularisation/postsecular theory, spirituality, and meditation.
Website

Maria Alessandra Bianchi
Research Fellow at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Aix-en-Provence, CHERPA (Croyance, Histoire, Espaces, Regulation Politique et Administrative).
Research topics: Interpretative Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology of Religion, Sociology of Conversion, Western Buddhism, Sociology of Emotions, History and Philosophy of Buddhism.
Website

Sara Bonfanti
PhD in Migration Studies (University of Bergamo and Bologna Consortium).
Research topics: transnational kinship, moral economies, south Asian religious ethics and life narratives, migrant women’s access to public healthcare, multisite ethnography between Italy and India, gender and generational change in Punjabi diasporic families.
Website

Damiano Bondi
Assistant Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of Florence, and research coordinator at the Fondazione Centro Studi Campostrini of Verona.
Research topics: the French personalism of the XXth Century, in particular Denis de Rougemont, the link between philosophy, ecology and religion, the theological concept of “person”.
Website

Gianfranco Bria
PhD student in History and Anthropology of Islam at the EHESS in Paris and the University of Calabria IT.
Research topics: Islam and Sufism in contemporary Albanians countries (Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia) and in the Balkans.
Website

Daniela Calvo
PhD student in Social Sciences at UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
Research topics: Afro-Brazilian religions: local and transnational dynamics; tradition, syncretism and anti-syncretism; Candomblé: role of women, new dynamics, national and international diffusion, cosmology and practices, health and care; the cult of Maria Lionza: dynamics between tradition, history and contemporaneity.
Website

ANTONIO CAMORRINO
Antonio Camorrino is Researcher (RTDA) at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Naples Federico II, where he teaches Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes. He also teaches Sociology of New media at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, and Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the School of Medicine of the University of Naples Federico II.
Research topics: His research interests are mostly related to the sociology of culture, of communicative processes, of religion and of scientific knowledge. These interests encompass the study of the transformations of the imagery, with special reference to the complex and changing relations   between human being and nature. He has published two monographies and a number of articles and essays on these topics. His works have been published on journals and books of both national and international relevance.

Silvia Carnelli
PhD. Secondary school teacher and University researcher in European cultural history.
Research topics: German-speaking countercultural poetry, the development of holistic medicine in Western society and the interpretation of Celtic holy places within the New Age movement, New Pagan religions, gender spirituality and New Age natural religions.
Website

ANNA CLOT-GARRELL
Anna Clot-Garrell is a researcher at the ISOR (Investigations in Sociology of Religion), University Autònoma of Barcelona.
Research topics: Her research focuses on the study of cultural change and multiple expressions of contemporary religious pluralism.

Elisabetta Di Giovanni
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Palermo.
Research topics: religious anthropology and Romani/Gypsies studies. She is the co-convenor  of the Summer School on “Migrants, Human Rights and Democracy” and of the Permanent Observatory on Religious Pluralism.
Website

Janet ECCLES
PhD, at  Lancaster University UK. Independent Researcher. She worked, as research associate, for the Young Atheists Project.
Research topics: Christian women affiliates and disaffiliates, forms of non-religion, Multi-faith chaplaincy, Anglican monasticism and insider/outsider issues. 

MONICA GILLI
is a sociologist of Environment and Territory specialized in Tourism working at the Univeristy of Turin, Department ESOMAS.
Research topics: tourism as a factor in local development, heritage tourism (tourism and identity), religious and spiritual tourism, food.

Marcin Jewdokimow
PhD. Assistant professor in Sociology of Culture of the Faculty of Humanities (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw) and an Acting Head of Department of the XXth Century Culture in the Institute of Classical and Cultural Studies (FH CSWU).
Website

Andrea Molle
PhD, FRAS, Assistant Professor in Political Science and Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society at Chapman University (CA, USA). Research topics: the investigation of the intersection of religion and politics in different fields of the Social Sciences, international relations, computational social sciences, cross-cultural studies of new religions, religious violence and warfare studies.

Maria Caterina Mortillaro
PhD in Anthropology, teaching assistant at the University of Milano Bicocca.
Research topics: Anthropology of Religion, inculturation of Christianity, interreligious dialogue, corporeity and religion, Christian Bharatanatyam.
Website

Elsa Ngar-sze Lau
BSSc(CUHK), Mphil (Oxon), PhD candidate at Lancaster University.
Research topics: Mindfulness meditation, Children and Spirituality.
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Tatsuma Padoan
Lecturer in Japanese Religions, SOAS, University of London; member of LISaV (International Semiotics Laboratory of Venice), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Research topics: the study of ritual – including pilgrimage, religious materiality and spirit possession – , the study of design practices and the politics of urban space.
Website

Alice Panepinto
Research Fellow, Centre for Human Rights in Practice, Law School at Warwick University. Research topics: human rights, international law, Islamic jurisprudence, socio-legal studies
Website

WILLIAM PAWLET
Dr William Pawlett, Senior Lecturer in Media and Humanities at The University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Research Interests: Continental Philosophy, Religion and the Sacred, Social and Cultural Theory, Media Studies.

Emily Pierini
Social anthropologist.
Research topics: spiritual healing and mental health, therapeutic itineraries, spirit mediumship, religious learning, experience, emotion and senses, body and the self in Brazil (Vale do Amanhecer and Afro-Brazilian religions); the spread of these Brazilian practices across Europe. She coordinates a project on the development of ethnographic approaches to health and spirituality.
Website

ELISABETTA PORCU
Elisabetta Porcu, PhD in religious studies (2006), teaches Asian Religions at the University of Cape Town. Before moving to South Africa in 2014, she worked at universities in Japan, Germany, and Hawaii. She has extensively written on religion in Japan, and among others, she is the author of Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture (Brill, 2008), “Sacred Spaces Reloaded: New Trends in Shintō” (2013), and “Pop Religion in Japan: Temples, Icons and Branding” (2014). She is currently writing her second monograph on Japanese religions and popular culture and conducting a research on the Gion Festival in Kyoto. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Religion in Japan (Brill).
Research interests: Japanese religions in contemporary society; Religion, consumerism and branding; religion, popular culture and media; religious/secular paradigm; secularization; religious festivals.
Website

Giovanna Rech
Giovanna Rech, PhD, teaches sociology of tourism at the University of Trento.
Research topics: religious and spiritual tourism, processes of heritagization and valorisation in religious living legacies.
Website

Isabella Riccò
PhD student in Medical Anthropology at Rovira I Virgili University of Tarragona (Spain). Her thesis is on folk medicine in Emilia Romagna (Italia) and Catalunya (Spain).
Website

Veronica Roldan
PhD in Sociology and Sociological Methodology at University of Rome 3.
Research topics: New Religious Movements in Latin America and Italy, religion in the public sphere, immigration and inclusion, Charismatic Catholic Revival, the cult of “El Señor de los Milagros”.
Website

Eugenia Roussou
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA-FCSH), Universidade Nova Lisboa.
Research topics: anthropological study of contemporary religion, alternative spirituality, religious pluralism, (spi)ritual healing.
Website

Carmelo Russo
PhD student at University “La Sapienza” – Rome. Research topics: History, Anthropology, Religions.
Research: relations between Italian community and others faiths groups of the XIX-XX centuries in Tunisia, focused on the worship of Virgin Mary of Trapani at La Goulette; Italian community in Tunisia, Muslim communities in Rome; plural and multireligious urban areas; Pentecostal and charismatic movements (especially from African diaspora).
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Francesco Sacchetti
PhD in Methodology of Social Sciences.
Research topics: epistemological, methodological and technical fields of social research, with particular reference to ethnography, and qualitative tools.
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Rossana Salerno
PhD “Sociology of Innovation and Development”. Tutor in Political Science and Human Services – University of Enna studies “Kore”.
Research topics: Sociology of religion, sociology of the territory and the environment, sociology of cultural and communication processes, criminology, sociology of deviance, identity and gender, popular and ethnographic traditions.
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Stefanie Sinclair
Lecturer in Religious Studies, The Open University, with a special research interest in religion and identity (gender and national identities in particular).
Research topics: Religion and gender; Religion, politics and national identity (part. in Germany and the UK); Religion and education; Religion as cultural heritage; Religious minorities in Europe (part. Islam and Judaism).
Website

CAROLINE STARKEY
Caroline Starkey, Research and Teaching Fellow, University of Leeds.
Research topics: Buddhism and Jainism in the West, Contemporary Monasticism, Religion and Gender, Material religion and the built environment, religious conversion, ethnography.
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Daniela Turco
PhD in “Politics, Society and Culture”.
Research topics: Sociology of Religion, the relationship between Muslim culture and the contemporary world.

Elena Zapponi
PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, she is now a Research Fellow at the University of Geneva/Foundation for Interreligious Dialogue and Intercultural Research.
Research topics: evolution of santería in Cuba, syncretism and antisyncretism politics of identity, re-invention of tradition.

PierLuigi Zoccatelli
Deputy Director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions (Turin, Italy). Associate editor of the monumental Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy, Elledici, 2013).
Research topics:  new religious movements, western esotericism, religious pluralism.
CESNUR
“Le religioni in Italia”
Academia.edu