Suma Ikeuchi

Suma Ikeuchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research focuses on diaspora, care, and technology in Global Asia, with a particular emphasis on migration, religious identities, and aging societies. She is the author of Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2019), which won the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize and the Clifford Geertz Prize in 2020. Currently, her NSF-funded project examines eldercare politics in aging Japan, comparing Filipino migrant caregivers and robotic care technologies.

She is affiliated with UCSB's Center for Aging and Longevity Studies (CALS) and has conducted interdisciplinary work at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, and technology studies. Her teaching and research interests include transnationalism, religion, aging, and migration policies.