Jarrod W. Brown is a Berea alum (2004) where he studied philosophy. During that time, he spent one academic year at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, where he earned an undergraduate certificate in Southeast Asian studies and then worked as a translator and program assistant for the World Affairs Council in Malaysia the following year. After graduation from Berea, he served as the Program Assistant to the Center for Learning, Teaching, Communication and Research (now the Center for Transformative Learning) from February 2004 to July 2005. Jarrod also spent two months as a special guest of Asia InnerStage, studying and conducting research in Japan.

In 2005, Jarrod moved to Bangalore, India, where he primarily resided until beginning graduate studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2008. Jarrod has more than a decade of leadership experience in education technologies and instruction, including serving as founding academic director of TutorVista.Com, which grew into the largest online tutoring company in the world during Jarrod’s tenure, and co-designing Pearson Writing Services (now Pearson Smarthinking), currently used by hundreds of institutions of higher education in North America.

Jarrod served as Executive Direct of Woodford & Wheeler International Cultural Consulting, Inc. for a decade where he worked supporting ed-tech start-ups in the United States, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, South Korea, and Singapore. He was a co-founder of the first online tutoring company in the Middle East and North Africa regions, eMuallim.

He is a founding and lifetime member of the Global Society for Online Literacy Educators, an affiliate of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum, Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and other umbrella organizations.

Jarrod’s academic background is in Western, South Asian, and Islamic philosophy and Southeast Asian studies. Jarrod has lived, worked, and studied in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodia and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Myanmar and Vietnam. At the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Jarrod’s philosophy coursework focused on canonical texts in the Western tradition, contemporary metaphysics, South Asian philosophy (Indian and Buddhist), and Islamic philosophy.

Jarrod’s dissertation, The Metaphysics of Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, pulled on sources from contemporary analytic metaphysics; classical philosophy; the debates between Buddhists, NyāyaVaiśeṣika, and Prabhākara Mīmāṃsāka in the Sanskritic traditions; Islamic jurisprudence; and virtue epistemology to address contemporary issues in analytical metaphysics and epistemology related to the metaphysics and recognition of similarity and its use in reasoning. His dissertation committee members were Dr. Tamara Albertini, Dr. Arindam Chakrabarti (chair), Dr. Vrinda Dalmiya, Dr. Jesse Knutson (outside member), and Dr. George Tsai. Jarrod’s work as a graduate student was supported by a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship, one of the largest and most competitive scholarships in the United States, as well as other assistantships and fellowships.

Jarrod completed over 80 credit hours in Southeast Asian studies courses and languages, including language coursework in Sanskrit, Khmer (Cambodian), and Indonesian; he received the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in both Indonesian and Khmer languages, and received the Critical Language Scholarship to study Indonesian in East Java at the Universitas Negeri Malang. Jarrod completed his language graduate exams in Sanskrit (distinguished). His Indonesia was assessed as high-advanced by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. His Khmer was assessed as intermediate by the Institute of Foreign Languages, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Jarrod also has language skills in Pali, the canonical language of Theravada Buddhism, and limited communication and literacy skills in Vietnamese. He has continued his language studies formally, in terms of coursework, and informally through tutors and self-study since those assessments. He received the Critical Language Studies Alumni Scholarship to receive futher intensive one-on-one instruction in Indonesian in 2023-2024.

Jarrod came to Berea College as a sabbatical replacement in 2016 and moved into a tenure-track position in 2019. Since coming to Berea, Jarrod has received several sources of funding for his research, including funding the provided opportunities for undergraduate students.

In 2017, he received the prestigious Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship which provided funding for travel and stay for two weeks of archival research at the Library of Congress Asian Reading Room. Jarrod presented his research from that fellowship’s study at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference in March 2018.

Jarrod also received a four-year grant from NASA’s South and Southeast Asia Research Initiative, “Land-Cover/Land-Use Change in Southern Vietnam Through the Lenses of Conflict, Religion, and Politics, 1980s to Present” to investigate the influence of Hòa Hảo Buddhism on environmental ethics and attitudes and their impacts on land-use change. Funding began in February 2018 and included funding for an undergraduate research assistant. Jarrod conducted three summers of fieldwork in Vietnam, including leading a team of faculty from the University of Maryland and Miami University, as well as fieldwork with Vietnamese diaspora communities in Kentucky and California. This work resulted in publications in both the areas for remote sensing science and philosophy.

Jarrod received the AsiaNetwork Freeman Faculty-Student Fellowship for the project titled, “Sacred Geography & Environmental Change in Southern Vietnam.” This fellowship provided full funding for Jarrod and four undergraduate students to conduct research related environmental change though the lens of sacred geography in southern Vietnam in 2023, marrying remote sensing, ethnography, economics, political science, agricultural science, and religious studies. Students presented the research at a national conference in 2024.

Most recently, Jarrod received the Fulbright Fellowship to Kingdom of Cambodia for the 2023-2024 academic year and served as a consultant for the Kingdom’s Ministry of Youth, Education, and Sports through the New Generation Pedagogical Research Center (NGPRC), an autonomous unit of the National Institute for Education, and in association with the Kampuchea Action to Promote Education, the Kingdom’s largest and oldest education NGO. There, Jarrod developed training programs for developing digital learning content in Khmer language, “Digital Sala;” served as an external adviser for the World Bank funded STEP-UP project to better STEM education in Cambodia, developing a digital prototype for identifying, addressing, and tracking professional development needs; served as secretary for multiple international conferences; helped develop both digital libraries and digital publishing capacities for the NGPRC; and coordinated collaborations with Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Embassy in Cambodia. Jarrod also spend one tenth of his time conducting research into Khmer philosophies as a guest of the Buddhist Institute of Cambodia.

Currently, Jarrod’s study and research focuses on philosophies of embodiment and sex, Southeast Asian philosophical traditions, and Southeast Asian history. He is currently enrolled in Javanese language courses through Wisma Bahasa to develop communication and literacy skills to further explore Javanese philosophical texts. Jarrod is also currently working on a book project about southern Vietnamese Buddhism under contract with an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and an English language translation of the Sam Giang, the canonical text of Hoa Hao Buddhism.