Joshua Tan

My proposed dissertation explores the intersections between religion and diaspora in modern China, focusing on how religion has facilitated mobility, demarcated and shaped particularly Chinese identities in the diaspora. It contributes to growing scholarship in Chinese religion and transnationalism, which have neglected how transnational networks drawn along religious lines delimit or create new audiences, and ways of understanding Chinese identity. Drawing upon family histories, private church and temple collections, as well as local archives, I foreground travels of Christian and Buddhist clergy between South China and Southeast Asia, as creating an alternative diaspora beyond economic or kinship networks.