Charles Townsend is a Doctoral Candidate and Associate Instructor in Religious Studies at UC Riverside. His research and teaching interests include Asian religions, American religions, and sacred sound. His dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of transnational Sikhism focused especially on the internationally mobile performers of Sikh religious music and the mass movement to teach young generations of Sikhs outside of India how to perform Sikh sacred music. He has been conducting research in U.S. Sikh communities for almost a decade and his publications include: “Darbar Sahib” in? The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies? (2014), ‘Performance’ and ‘Lived Religion’ Approaches as New Ways of ‘Re-Imagining’ Sikh Studies in? Re-Imagining South Asian Religions? (2013) and “Gurbani Kirtan and the Performance of Sikh Identity in Southern California” in? Sikhism in Global Context? (2011). Townsend directs the ISIR/RIDAGA field study of the Yuba City Nagar Kirtan, an annual gathering of an estimated 100,000 people in Yuba City, California, making it one of the largest religious gatherings in the U.S.