Heather Mellquist Lehto | Korean Multisite Churches

Heather Mellquist Lehto is a cultural anthropologist whose work attends to the intersections of technology, religion, and kinship in South Korea and the United States. She is a postdoctoral research fellow on an interdisciplinary research project Beyond Secularization: Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life at Arizona State University. Her first major research project and book manuscript, Holy Infrastructure, draw on over two years of ethnographic research to demonstrate the co-construction of Christianity and technology in transnational Korean multisite churches. Her current research project, Skinship: Communion and Contagion in South Korea, examines the sociocultural significance of skin. Through ethnographic research in various social settings, this research traces how conceptions of skin, race, and gender are informed by medical practices, public health projects, religious traditions, and the booming Korean cosmetics industry. Mellquist Lehto's research has received funding from the Fulbright-Hays fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Korea Foundation, the Academy for Korean Studies, and the Templeton Religion Trust. Her written work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of Korean Studies, Religion and Society, American Religion, and Acta Koreana, and her audio ethnographic research has been featured on the international public radio program PRI's The World.

Further Reading:

Mellquist Lehto, Heather. 2020. “Learning from Diaspora in Pandemic Times.” Religion and Society, vol. 11, no. 1, September: 199-204.
Mellquist Lehto, Heather. 2017. “Screen Christianity: Video Sermons and the Creation of Transnational Korean Churches.” Acta Koreana, vol. 20, no. 2, December: 395–421.

Mellquist Lehto, Heather. 2021. “Global Christianity as Method: Repositioning American Megachurches in their Global Context.” American Religion, vol. 3, no. 1, November.