Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra

Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra is a doctoral candidate pursuing a combined degree in the School of Architecture and the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. Broadly, her work explores how religious powers of extrastatecraft are operationalized in the built and natural environments in postcolonial 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 the Philippines, Guåhan-Guam, and Timor-Leste. 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 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, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, among others. Lisa is a Graduate Student Advisory Committee member for the Society of Architectural Historians and a Steering Committee member of the Religion and Cities Unit for the American Academy of Religion. She is a landscape designer and holds degrees from Yale University, Duke University, and the University of Washington.

Project Summary

“Parish Empire: Catholic Imperial Space in the Transpacific World”

“Parish Empire” investigates the territorial and real estate portfolio of the largest non-state landowner in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. Focusing on the Asia-Pacific, a region key to the future of global Catholicism and global climate change, this dissertation interrogates how Catholic property systems multiplied in majority-Catholic capitals from 1945 to the present. From this transnational perspective, this study focuses on archdiocesan traffics of ownership to argue that religious proprietorship continues to operate as an imperial infrastructural project that shapes the material landscapes and postcolonial politics of the Transpacific. Drawing on archival and visual sources in English, Italian, Portuguese, Tagalog, Tetum, and CHamoru, alongside ethnographic fieldwork, “Parish Empire” casts new light on the restructuring of Transpacific cities following the devastation of the Pacific War. It shows that the results center not on the Church’s postwar preservation of landed assets, but on their financialization, and at the core of this research is the unwritten history of the Church’s consecration and economic investments in corporate monopolies that sustain conditions of extreme wealth disparity and environmental degradation.

Research Area Keywords

Religion, Race, and Space in Global Modernity; Transpacific Architecture and Urbanism; Infrastructures of the Global Empire of Capital; History and Theory of Property; Sacred Space