Janet Hoskins will spend three months at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow in spring 2013. She is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Her research interests include transnational religion, migration and diaspora in Southeast Asia, and she has done extended field research in Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During her time at Shorenstein APARC, she will be completing a book manuscript dealing with Caodaism, a syncretistic Vietnamese religion born in French Indochina, which now has a global following of about four million people, and a considerable presence in California. She is also co-editing (with Viet Thanh Nguyen) a volume introducing the field of Transpacific Studies (to be published by University of Hawaii Press).

Hoskins is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (University of California, 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), and Biographical Objects: How Things Tells the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge 1998). She is the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford 1996), A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (Donizelli 1999), and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press 2001). Hoskins has also produced and written three ethnographic documentaries, including The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California (distributed by Documentary Educational Resources).

Hoskins holds an MA and PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, and a BA in anthropology from Pomona College. She has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Getty Research Institute, the Kyoto Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the University of Oslo, and the Asia Research Center at the National University of Singapore.