I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, the land of first-in-the-nation presidential primaries and not a whole lot else. Des Moines is generally a great place to be a kid, but for me the relative safety of the small city was always leavened by the ambient white supremacy that pervades Iowa culture. As a mixed-race kid with a Black father and a white mother, I spent my childhood developing increasingly inventive ways to respond to the politely rude question “What are you?” that often cropped up when I met someone new. These marginalizing experiences fostered a lot of early introspection about race and personhood, but those questions about race also overlapped with questions about religion. My mother had grown up in small-town Iowa as a preacher’s kid, and my maternal grandmother had grown up in Northeastern China as the daughter of missionaries. (My grandmother eventually returned to the region as a missionary as an adult.) Many of my early socializing experiences took place in my parents’ church, including some unforgettable early lessons about the social burdens of blackness and the coercive power of religious institutions. Despite my early and extensive exposure to politically liberal Christianity, I knew at some level that I was interested in religion as a subject of intellectual inquiry more than I was interested in being religious. That inclination remains true to this day.
After taking some time off from school to work in the Des Moines Public Schools and record an album with my band (I played electric bass), I matriculated at Grinnell College in 1997. Initially I was a terrible student, but I eventually found in religious studies some preliminary answers to many of the questions about religion that I had developed in my teenage years. Thanks to the patient instruction of several professors at Grinnell, I gradually came into my own as a serious student with professional aspirations as a public school teacher and a vague long-term goal of going to graduate school to study religion. I completed my undergraduate degree in 2001, and I stayed in central Iowa for another semester to work as a student teacher at the nearby Sac & Fox School located on the Meskwaki Settlement. Along with my earlier stint working with students diagnosed with behavioral disorders in Des Moines, my student teacher training planted the seed for a future research project on religion and education.
I was fortunate enough to have traveled to Japan as part of a sister city exchange program when I was 10, but I didn’t get serious about Japan until I moved to Tokyo on a whim in January of 2002. At the time I had no formal training in Japanese, but I hated being illiterate. That feeling forced me to undergo a crash course in the language of my new home. I embarked on a couple of years of serious independent study of Japanese, gradually learning to read manga and, eventually, novels. Because I had been a religious studies major, I brought to my study of Japanese a set of questions about how Japanese people engaged with institutions like shrines and temples and how they interpreted apparently “religious” content like deities and the afterlife. Everything I found in Japan confounded my expectations about how religion worked, and it prompted me to pair my longstanding interest in religion with my increasingly serious study of manga and anime as artistic and narrative forms.
When I started a master’s program in Asian religions at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa in 2004, I finally began formal Japanese language training and launched into a series of investigations into manga, anime, and religion in contemporary Japan. My research took me back to Tokyo from 2005–07, where I studied at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama and took courses in the religious studies department at the University of Tokyo. At the same time, I worked part-time at Kokugakuin University as a translator and editorial assistant on the online Encyclopedia of Shinto. The research I did during those years became the basis for my 2008 MA thesis and, ultimately, my 2012 book Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan.
I moved from Honolulu to Princeton in 2008. I had applied to Princeton’s PhD program hoping to work on modern Buddhist figures in Japan, but a curious coincidence in my first term spawned a brand-new research project that would become my second book. In one modern history seminar I was to present on the post-WWII Allied Occupation of Japan, while in a religious studies seminar I was to present on Talal Asad’s influential 2003 book Formations of the Secular. Doing the two presentations back to back, I could not help but pair Asad’s critical take on secularism with my reading of the history of the Occupation. A dissertation project was born. After doing another one-year research stint in Japan, in 2014 I defended my doctoral dissertation “Japan’s Preoccupation with Religious Freedom.” I then moved to Madison to take a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the humanities, during which time I did the bulk of the revisions on what would become my 2019 University of Chicago Press book, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan.
I started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. Since coming to Penn, I have regularly taught courses on Japanese religions and media, religion and politics, secularism and liberalism, and Asian religions more broadly. I see my professorial duties as extending far beyond the classroom, and as I deepen my roots in Philly I’ve been looking for new ways to connect my scholarly research with issues of local concern. For the last couple of years I have been working with a group of scholar-activists on encouraging Penn to offer Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) in support of Philadelphia public schools. I am also currently working on grants for a number of public-facing programs that will inform various publics about local religious history. These activities are directly related to, but extend far beyond, my current research project on religion and public schools in Japan and the United States.
In addition to my work on campus, I regularly perform service for the academy, serving on the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies and the steering committee of the Japanese Religions Unit at the American Academy of Religion. I am an editorial consultant for journals such as the American Religion, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Global Buddhism, Nova Religio. Current and future projects include editing the New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions as well as some collaborations with colleagues on topics such as corporations and religion, problems with the category of “animism,” and a fourth monograph on religion and taxes.
But academic work is not everything. In my free time I enjoy mixing cocktails, spinning records, and getting into the great outdoors for walks, runs, hikes, paddles, and bike rides.