Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra is a Ph.D. candidate pursuing a combined degree in the Department of Religious Studies and the School of Architecture at Yale University. Broadly, her work explores how religious powers of extrastatecraft are operationalized in the built and natural environments in the postcolonial contexts of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and North America. Her dissertation, Parish Empire: Catholic Imperial Space in the Transpacific World, examines the postwar spatial politics of Catholic institutions that mediate flows of capital in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Drawing on archival and visual sources in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Tetum, and CHamoru, alongside interviews with community stakeholders, her project investigates the Church’s consecration of real estate monopolies that sustain conditions of extreme wealth disparity and environmental degradation in the Global South.
Lisa’s work has been published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill, 2023), the edited volume Mapping Malcolm (Columbia University Press, 2024), and in the forthcoming collection Japanese American Design After Internment (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). Her research has been supported by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the Richard U. Light Fellowship, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. Lisa is a Graduate Student Advisory Committee member for the Society of Architectural Historians and steering committee member of the Religion and Cites Unit for the American Academy of Religion. She is a landscape architect and holds degrees from Yale University, Duke University, and the University of Washington.