Karis Haewon Ryu (CAR-iss HEH-won ROO) is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where she is also enrolled in the Graduate Certificate for Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Her work explores the intersections of race, religion, popular culture, and subject formation, particularly through the relationship between Asian American subjectivity and American secularism. She was a 2025 Tin House (now the McCormack Writing Center) Scholar, and is writing her first novel.

Karis's work has appeared in publications such as American Religion and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, as well as public-facing platforms such as Reading Religion and Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. She contributed a chapter about the worldbuilding of online Disney roleplay communities to the edited volume "Disney and Religion: A Small Spiritual World, After All," forthcoming in 2026 from Wiley-Blackwell. She holds an A.B. in History and East Asian Studies from Brown University and an M.A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School.