En-Chieh Chao is currently Professor of Sociology Department at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, holding her Ph.D. from Boston University, USA. As a cultural anthropologist she investigates the intersections between religion, gender, race, and modernity. Her book Entangled Pieties: Muslim-Christian Relations and Gendered Socialities in Java, Indonesia was released from Palgrave Macmillan in August 2017. More recently, Chao undertakes a project to study Islam with science, technology and society in the Indo-Malay world. She explores the overlooked multi- species sciences of halalness－the dynamics of Islamic ritual purity in modern life involving animal physiology, molecular biology, and oil chemistry－to expose the social contingencies that gave birth to certain scientific practices and religious understandings in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Her peer-reviewed articles (written either in English or Chinese) address issues including: the cultural history of inter-religious lives in Java; Islamophobia and cyber- racism in United States; young female hijab designers' social influence in Indonesia; as well as the scientification of halal knowledge amid Islamic jurisprudence, animal welfare discourse, and works of laboratory scientists from New Zealand to Malaysia and Indonesia since the 1980s .
