Kathryn Poethig

Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Religion and Society, 1997

Dissertation: “Ambivalent Moralities: Cambodian Americans and Dual Citizenship in Phnom Penh”

M.Div., Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1990

B.A., Anthropology, University of Chicago, Illinois, 1978

Dr. Poethig is Professor  emerita of Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. She has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for over thirty years. Her main areas of research are transnational religion and citizenship, feminist theology and conflict in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and the Philippines.  In Cambodia, she has published on the citizenship debates during Cambodia’s transition to democracy as diaspora Cambodians returned in the early 1990’s and the Dhammayietra, a Buddhist peace walk. She has written on the Filipino feminist theologians' frameworks for 'just peace' for both Communist and Muslim insurgencies in light of the US war on terrorism and more broadly on feminist theological approach to US Empire. Her current research considers how the religious imaginaries of communities at the margins of power often include non-human actors (spirits, animals, plants) who offer various forms of invisible aid through dreams, occult signs, possession, and apparitions.

Dr. Poethig has been advisor and faculty at Cambodian Peace and Conflict Studies'  Applied Conflict Transformation Studies MA program.  She has served on the boards of  Peace Summer Interfaith Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movement in Vancouver, Canada and the People's Forum on Peace for Life, a Global South-based interfaith initiative resisting Empire and militarized globalization. As a religious peacebuilder through Peace for Life, she joined delegations to the World Social Forum in Nairobi (2007), Nepal (2006), WTO in Hong Kong (2005), Philippines (2002),  and led study groups to Cambodia/Vietnam (1992), and to the NGO Forum of the 4th U.N. Conference on on Women in China (1995). Dr. Poethig was a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) and the Peace Discernment Steering Team, a participatory four-year process for discernment on current matters of peace and violence.