Prof Cristina Rocha PhD
Cristina Rocha is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Religion and Society Research Cluster, Western Sydney University, Australia.
She was awarded a Senior Fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (IEA) for 2021-2022. She co-edits the Journal of Global Buddhism and the Religion in the Americas series, Brill and is the former President of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion (2018-2019).
Cristina has taught anthropology at the Australian National University, Macquarie University and Western Sydney University.
She has held visiting research positions at Utrecht University, Kings College and Queen Mary College, CUNY Graduate Centre, and the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Cristina's research focuses on the intersections of globalisation, mobility and religion. As an anthropologist, she is interested in how globalised religions influence migration patterns and popular perceptions of other societies.
She has conducted several large ethnographic projects: Japanese Tea Ceremony in Brazil; Buddhism in the West; healing, spirituality and the New Age; and more recently on Pentecostalism and the African and Brazilian diasporas.
These projects have challenged the conventional assumptions in globalisation studies that culture radiates from the West to the periphery. Instead, she offers a multi-polar approach under which nations like Brazil and Japan can originate global religious flows.
She also presents a multi-scalar frame demonstrating that small towns can be the source of such flows, thus challenging the metropolitan bias of globalisation theory. Significantly, her concept of diasporic Brazilian religions has made an impact in the field and has been adopted by several scholars.
Cristina has been the recipient of the prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellowship, Future Fellowship and Discovery grants.
She is the author of 2 monographs (one was awarded Honourable Mention in the 2019 Clifford Geertz prize in the anthropology of religion section of the American Anthropological Association); 3 edited books; and over 60 articles and book chapters.
Her publications have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, French and Portuguese and used in many universities in the world.
She is now working on a new book on the transnational Pentecostal connections between Australia and Brazil, titled ‘The Hillsong Style: Young Brazilians Fashioning Cosmopolitan Identities.’
Upcoming
January 2022
'Moving with the Spirit: An australian Megachurch in Brazil.' Dept. of Latin American Studies, Universite Cahtolique de Louvain, Belgium.
January 2022
‘A Modern Style: The Affective Affordances of the Australian megachurch Hillsong.’ Paris Institute for Advanced Study, France.
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