Dr. Jovan Maud

Jovan Maud has been at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology from 2011 to 2020. His area of specialization is Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, where he has researched contemporary religion, pilgrimage and tourism in the southern borderland with Malaysia. His doctoral dissertation, 'The Sacred Borderland: A Saint, the State, and Transnational Religion in Southern Thailand' (2008), was awarded the Vice Chancellor's Commendation for Excellence in Postgraduate Research at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. During 2010-11, Jovan was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. In recent years, Jovan has researched and taught in the area of 'digital anthropology' and he is currently writing about online forms of Buddhist devotion on platforms such as Facebook. He is editor and managing editor of the Journal of Global Buddhism. Furthermore, he cooperated with Prof. Andrea Lauser to develop e-learning units devoted to the teaching of ethnographic methods.


Religion and the nation-state in Thailand, Theravada Buddhism and Chinese religious forms, transnational cultural and religious flows, religious commoditisation and syncretism, Buddhist saints and popular religiosity, pilgrimage and religious tourism, digital technologies and religion