Notes on Contributors
Elias Kifon Bongmba
holds the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Chair in Christian Theology and is Professor of Religion at Rice University. He is President of the African Association for the Study of Religions. He is the author of The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa (Palgrave, 2006), which won the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He holds an Honorary Doctorate in the Faculty of Theology at Lund University.
Stian Sørlie Eriksen
works as Assistant Professor and programme director of Intercultural and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Theology, Diaconal and Leadership Studies at VID Specialized University in Stavanger, Norway. His research interests are in particular related to religion and migration, global Pentecostalism and mission studies. He is currently in process of completing his PhD thesis in theology and religion with a project on mission and migrant churches in Norway.
Rune Flikke
is Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He has extensive research experience from African Independent Churches in Durban, South Africa. He has been involved in several research projects sponsored by The Research Council of Norway. Flikke has recently started working with resource management and nature conservation with a focus on issues of religious rituals, wellbeing, nature conservation, alien species, and conceptions of changing landscapes in South Africa. In 2019 he will start working on an RCN sponsored project on the global dissemination of salmonids.
Lotta Gammelin
is a PhD Candidate in Global Christianity and Interreligious Relations at Lund University. Her main research interests are intersections of gender and religion, especially in African contexts. Her PhD project is an ethnographic study of a charismatic, locally founded, church in Mbeya, Tanzania, focusing on healing and gender.
Elina Hankela
is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religion Studies at the University of Johannesburg where she, among other things, teaches liberation theologies and qualitative research methods. Besides liberation theologies and ethnography as a method in studying and teaching theology and religion, her research interests include understanding xenophobia, charity and other social justice related questions, in particular, in the context of urban South Africa. She is the author of the award-winning book Ubuntu, Migration and Ministry (Brill, 2014), based on her PhD dissertation.
Niels Kastfelt
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Church History and the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Kulturmøde i Nigeria (Gad, 1981) and Religion and Politics in Nigeria. A Study in Middle Belt Christianity (B Tauris & Co Ltd, 1994) and the editor of Scriptural Politics. The Bible and the Koran as Political Models in the Middle East and Africa (Hurst & Co Ltd., 2003) and Religion and African Civil Wars (Palgrave, 2005).
Karen Lauterbach
is Associate Professor at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research has focused on charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in Africa with a particular focus on Ghana and Uganda. She has worked on the career trajectories of young pastors and analyzed how becoming a pastor is a way of social becoming. Her research has also focused on displacement and religion in the context of Congolese refugee churches in Kampala, Uganda. She is the author of the monograph Christianity, Wealth and Spiritual Power in Ghana (Palgrave, 2017).
Ingrid Løland
is a PhD Candidate and Research Fellow at the Centre for Mission and Global Studies, VID Specialized University, Stavanger. She is currently working on a project focusing on Syrian refugees in Norway, looking at the intersection between migration, religion and identity discourses in a conflict-induced Syrian refugee context.
Isabel Mukonyora
is Professor in Religious Studies at Western Kentucky University. She teaches a wide ranging number of courses starting with an Introduction of World Religions, Christian Theology, Global Christianity and women and the environment. She takes part in collaborative research activities on Christianity in Africa and others concerned with grounding knowledge about Christianity in world experiencing climate change. Her current book project looks at African ideas for developing a global theology for what has clearly become an era for both Global Christianity and global warming.
is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen. His work in Tanzania and Zanzibar over the past ten years has produced, among others, the monographs The Politics of Interfaith Institutions in Contemporary Tanzania (Swedish Science Press, 2011) and Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation (Brill, 2019), which is based on his PhD dissertation.
Martina Prosén
is a Ph.D. Candidate in Global Christianity and Interreligious Relations at Lund University, Sweden and part of the research project Looking for Wholeness. Her research focuses on worship as a ritual phenomenon in two charismatic churches in Nairobi, Kenya. She has a long history of living in different parts of Africa.
Joel Robbins
is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has worked extensively on the development of the anthropology of Christianity and he is author of the award-winning book, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press, 2004). He is currently completing a book on the relationship between anthropology and theology that is based on the Stanton Lectures, delivered at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge in 2018.
Galia Sabar
serves as the President of Ruppin Academic Center in Israel since 2016. Formerly, she was the Head of African Studies at Tel Aviv University. For the past 30 years her research has focused on the history and religious manifestation of Ethiopian Jews, the relation between church and state in Kenya, socio-political aspects of HIV\AIDS prevention education in Africa, life experiences of African labour migrants and asylum seekers in Israel and the complex phenomena of return migration of undocumented African migrants. She received the “unsung heroes of compassion award” from the Dalai Lama for translating her scientific work into social activism in 2009.
Tomas Sundnes Drønen
is Professor of Global Studies and Religion at VID Specialized University (former School of Mission and Theology), Stavanger, Norway. He is currently Dean at the Faculty of Theology, Diaconia, and Leadership Studies. Drønen has worked and conducted fieldwork in Cameroon for several years, and he has authored many publications on globalization, religion and development, migration and religious change in Africa including Communication and Conversion in Northern Cameroon (Brill, 2009), Pentecostalism, Globalisation and Islam in Northern Cameroon (Brill, 2013).
Carl Sundberg
obtained his D.Th. in Mission Studies at Lund University, Sweden, in 2000. In 1979 he was ordained a pastor of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden and in 1989 he was consecrated as a missionary to the Congos. Sundberg has spent 12 years in the Republic of Congo and he is currently working as a lecturer at the Protestant University of Brazzaville, teaching contextual theology and African theology.
Mika Vähäkangas
is Professor in Mission Studies and Ecumenics at Lund University, Sweden , and Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has directed several projects related to African Christianity, including Looking for Wholeness in an Enchanted World: Healing Prosperity and Ritual Action in African Charismatic/Pentecostal Churches. He has been a lecturer at Makumira University College of Tumaini University, Tanzania, as well as Helsinki University, Finland, and president of the International Association for Mission Studies.
Frans Wijsen
is Professor of Religious Studies and Mission Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He conducted fieldwork in Tanzania from 1984 till 1988. From 1995 till 2004 he was visiting professor at Duta Wacana Christian University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and from 2004 till 2007 at Tangaza College, Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2011 he has been Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His main research interest is the discursive study of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations from a dialogical self-theory perspective.