Carolyn Chen Named New Co-Director of BCSR

Miranda Schonbrun

BCSR is proud to announce that Carolyn Chen has joined David Marno as Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Carolyn Chen is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her new book, Work Pray Code: When Work Replaces Religion in Silicon Valley, is about the transformation in work, religion, and community in late capitalist America. It will be published this spring by Princeton University Press. 

Carolyn has been an active member of BCSR and the broader Berkeley community. In fall 2020, Carolyn participated in BCSR’s Public Forum on Religion and Pandemic Online Reflections series, where she discussed “The Work of Salvation, the Salvation of Work: Searching for Belonging in an Age of Global Precarity.” Carolyn also recently organized the event “Centering Asian Voices in American Buddhism: Anger, Refuge, Solidarity” with Chenxing Han (Bay Area–Based Writer). Carolyn is a faculty member of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Religious Diversity Cluster at the Othering & Belonging Institute.