About

UPDATE: I’ll be on research leave during AY 2026–2027 and, regrettably, will not be able to accept new requests during this period. Thank you very much for your kind understanding.

Jack Meng-Tat Chia is the Foo Hai Associate Professor in Buddhist Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of religion with a focus on Buddhism and Chinese religions in Southeast Asia. His first book, Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea (Oxford, 2020), was awarded the 2021 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2023 Friedrich Weller Prize. It has been translated into Chinese and Indonesian. His second book, Dongnanya fayin: Xinjiapo fojiao yanjiu lunji 東南亞法音: 新加坡佛教研究論集 [Southeast Asia’s Dharma: Essays on Buddhism in Singapore] (Boyang, 2025), explores the historical evolution and contemporary transformations of Buddhism in Singapore and its regional connections. His edited volume, Figures of Buddhist Diplomacy in Modern Asia (Bloomsbury 2026), supported by the 2020 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship awarded by the Social Science Research Council, Singapore, traces twenty-two monastic, lay, and political figures engaged in Buddhist diplomacy from the early twentieth century to the present. His children’s book, The Journey of Ashin Jinarakkhita (Karaniya, 2026), illustrated by Ruizhong Choo, is a bilingual English–Indonesian story about Tee Boan An, a curious boy from Bogor who grows up to become Ashin Jinarakkhita, the monk who established the Buddhayana movement in Indonesia.

Chia is currently developing three book projects. Sisters in Dharma: Buddhist Women in Maritime Southeast Asia explores the lives of three pioneering Buddhist women and their contributions to the making of modern Buddhism across maritime Southeast Asia. Buddhayana: The Making of an Indonesian Buddhist Movement offers the first comprehensive account of the rise and transformation of the Buddhayana movement in Indonesia. Buddhist Diplomacy: A Global History traces the historical trajectories and transregional dimensions of Buddhist diplomacy from its earliest origins to the contemporary world.

Chia is the founding chair of the Buddhist Studies Group and the co-chair of the GL Louis Religious Pluralism Research Cluster at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS. He co-chairs the Theravada Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies and serves as a board member of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions. He is an editor for the journals Asian Culture and the Journal of Global Buddhism, and serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Buddhism, Journal of Chinese Religions, MINDEN: Journal of History and Archaeology, the Yin-Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism, and the book series “Chinese Buddhism and Asian Civilization” (Springer) and “Religion in Contemporary Asia” (De Gruyter). He is also a member of the Heritage Advisory Panel and the National Collection Advisory Panel of the National Heritage Board.

Born and raised in Singapore, Chia earned his PhD in History from Cornell University, where his dissertation received the Lauriston Sharp Prize. He holds a BA (Hons) and MA in History from the National University of Singapore, as well as a second MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he was a Harvard-Yenching Fellow. Before joining NUS, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

He is married to Dr. Ming-yen Lee, an ethnomusicologist at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Singapore.

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