Jack Meng-Tat Chia: Difference between revisions

Jack Meng-Tat Chia FRHistS (born 21 July 1982) is the Foo Hai Ch'an Monastery Fellow in Buddhist Studies and an Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. Chia is the founding chair of the Buddhist Studies Group and the convenor of the GL Louis Religious Pluralism Research Cluster at NUS.^[1]

Chia received his BA and MA in History from the National University of Singapore and his second MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he was a Harvard-Yenching Fellow. He received his PhD in History at Cornell University, where his dissertation won the Lauriston Sharp Prize. He studied with Anne Blackburn, P. Steven Sangren, and Eric Tagliacozzo at Cornell.^[2]

Chia specializes in Buddhism and Chinese religions in Southeast Asia and authored Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford, 2020), which won the 2021 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize.^[3]Monks in Motion explores the intertwined history of Buddhist communities across China and maritime Southeast Asia during the twentieth century. It introduces the concept of "South China Sea Buddhism" to describe the form of Buddhism that developed in maritime Southeast Asia through a complex web of correspondence networks, forced exiles, voluntary visits, missionary efforts, institution-building campaigns, and the organizational work of Chinese and Chinese diasporic Buddhist monks.^[4]

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