David C. Andolfatto, Associate Researcher, Nepal Heritage Documentation Project, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Germany
Andolfatto studied Asian archaeology at Paris Sorbonne University (MA and PhD). His research focuses on the archaeology, history and art history of Nepal. A UNESCO consultant from 2015 to 2018, he conducted archaeological excavations and coordinated conservation projects on Nepalese heritage sites. His PhD dissertation on the archaeology of West Nepal led him to document historical sites and artifacts in this largely overlooked part of the country. Andolfatto is continuing his documentation efforts as he is a part of the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project at Heidelberg University.

Megan Culbertson Bryson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee
Megan Bryson’s research focuses on religion in the Dali region of Yunnan Province, as well as the broader themes of Buddhism, gender, and ethnicity. Her first monograph, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016), traces the worship of a local deity in Dali from the 12th to 21st centuries. Bryson’s current projects include a second monograph tracing Buddhist transmission along the southwestern Silk Road, which has received support from an ACLS fellowship; and the co-edited volume (with Kevin Buckelew) Buddhist Masculinities (forthcoming, Columbia University Press).

Wen-shing Chou, Associate Professor of Art History, Hunter College & The Graduate Center, CUNY
Wen-Shing Chou specializes in art of China and Inner Asia. Her 2018 book Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain (Princeton University Press) won Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Prize (China Pre-1900) from the Association for Asian Studies. She recently co-curated and coedited C.C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction (Hirmer Verlag, 2023), which focuses on the artistic experimentations of the preeminent connoisseur and collector of Chinese art in the twentieth century. Chou's current book project explores the visual and material culture of rebirth within the Gelukpa sphere of influence in Qing China and Inner Asia. 

Susan Dine, Senior Lecturer, Vanderbilt University
Susan Dine works in the fields of Japanese Art History and Museum Studies. Her research includes pre-modern Buddhist visual cultures, particularly the intersections of representations of language, bodies, and materiality in medieval Japanese works. Additionally, she studies Ainu (Indigenous peoples of northern Japan) ritual objects and the histories of their collection and display.

Caroline Hirasawa, Associate Professor, Waseda University
Caroline Hirasawa’s first book Hell-bent for Heaven in Tateyama Mandara (Brill, 2013), discusses a cult that developed around Tateyama mountain (Toyama), which was seen as a portal to hell and paradise. She edited an issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies entitled “Modest Materialities: The Social Lives and Afterlives of Sacred Things in Japan” (2018), and has published various articles on paintings of hell and other worlds. Her current book project focuses on medieval Japanese paintings that promote the efficacy of Buddhist deities, practitioners, rites and objects.

Yoonah Hwang, Postdoctoral Scholar-Teaching, Art History, University of Southern California 
Yoonah Hwang’s research interests include the Buddhist art and material culture in northwestern China, focusing on textile production, rituals, and artistic practice and exchange during the ninth-tenth centuries. Her dissertation, “Projecting Wishes on Flying Banners: Materiality and Painted Banners from Cave 17 in Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, China in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries," explores the artistic labors, material qualities, and religious functions of painted banners from the Library Cave. She has also worked as a curatorial assistant at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul.

Sujung Kim, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, DePauw University
Sujung Kim specializes in Japanese and Korean Buddhism and is interested in understanding the interaction between Buddhist cultures using textual and material sources in East Asian context. After her first monograph, Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), she is currently working on her second book, titled Korean Magical Medicine: Healing Talismans in Korean Buddhism, which explores religious, socio-cultural, and medicinal roles that talismans played in the life of ordinary people in pre-modern Korea. This book project is supported by ACLS/Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation.

Youn-mi Kim, Associate Professor, Ewha Womans University
Prior to joining the Ewha faculty, Youn-mi Kim worked as Assistant Professor at Yale University (2012-16) and Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University (2011-12). She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. She is the editor of New Perspectives on Early Korean Art: From Silla to Koryo (Korea Institute, Harvard University Press, 2013); and a co-editor of “Pokchang” (2019), a special issue in Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 28, and “the Dhāraṇī and Mantra in Ritual, Art, and Text” (2020), a special issue in the International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture. A grantee of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowships in Buddhist Studies (2018), she is currently completing her book manuscript, entitled Visualizing the Invisible: Liao Pagodas, Cosmology, and Body.

Seunghye Lee 李勝慧, Curator, Leeum Museum of Art
Seunghye Lee received her PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago with a specialty in Chinese and Korean Buddhist art and architecture. Her research focuses on the interrelationship among Buddhist images, ritual practices, and materiality in pre-modern East Asia. She is a guest co-editor of a special issue of Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie dedicated to the consecration of Korean Buddhist images (2019). She is currently working on a book manuscript that unfolds the history of this important ritual tradition in both local and cross-cultural contexts.

Ching-chih Lin, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Religious Studies, National Chengchi University
Ching-Chih Lin received his PhD in History from UC, Berkeley, and was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His research interests include Chinese folklore, popular religion, environmental history, digital humanities, folk visual arts, and intangible cultural heritage of joss paper and incense. He focuses on the interplay between religion and environment, by applying historical studies, fieldwork, and digital humanities in Shandong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. He had observed the religious beliefs and folk customs from Anxi, Fujian, through northern Taiwan in recent years, and contributed to the local community. 3D LiDAR scanning are also used to preserve digital records of cultural heritage.

Kate Lingley, Associate Professor, Art History, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Kate A. Lingley’s research focuses on Buddhist votive sculpture of the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, with a particular interest in the social history of religious art in medieval China. Her articles in this area have been published in Asia Major, Ars Orientalis, Early Medieval China, and Archives of Asian Art, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the lives of Buddhist women in medieval China, as seen through the votive monuments they dedicated. 

Jingyu Liu, Visiting Assistant Professor, Wheaton College (MA)
Jingyu Liu is a scholar of Chinese religious culture, with particular interests in the liturgical interactions between Buddhism and Daoism from the medieval to late imperial periods. She graduated from Harvard University in 2020.

David Mozina, Independent Scholar
David Mozina studies living Daoist and Buddhist ritual traditions in rural Hunan province, and their roots in the liturgical vibrancy of the Song, Yuan, and early Ming periods (10th–15th centuries), and in the religious traditions of the late imperial period (16th–19th centuries). He is interested in phenomenological and semiotic approaches to ritual; in the relationship between ritual and material culture (i.e., talismans, liturgical implements, religious art); and in different ways of combining ethnographic and historical research.

Chihiro Saka 坂 知尋,Project Research Fellow, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken)
After completing her MA in Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, Chihiro Saka received her PhD in Japanese Studies from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies. She published Datsueba the Clothes Snatcher: The Evolution of a Japanese Folk Deity from Hell Figure to Popular Savior (Brill, 2022) which explores the evolution of Datsueba, the old hag who appears by the river which people are supposed to cross after death.

Maya Stiller, Associate Professor, Korean Art and Visual Culture, University of Kansas
Maya Stiller’s first book Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan: Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea (2021) won the American Historical Association’s 2022 Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize. Her new research examines the modalities of display and reception of Zen motifs in Korean Buddhist ritual culture. Maya Stiller is the recipient of various awards, including a two-year ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Fellowship, which she spent at Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Trent Walker, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University
Trent Walker specializes in Southeast Asian Buddhist music, literature, and manuscripts, and has published widely on Khmer, Lao, Pali, Thai, and Vietnamese Buddhist texts and recitation practices. He is the author of Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (2022) and the co-editor of Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (2022). After completing a BA in Religious Studies at Stanford and a PhD in Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley, he served as the Khyentse Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Chulalongkorn University before returning to Stanford.

Mengxiao Wang 王萌筱, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California
Mengxiao Wang specializes in traditional Chinese literature and culture, with a primary focus on the interplay between literary production and religious practice. Her current book project, Buddhism and Theatricality in Early Modern China, investigates how the monastics and the laity reshaped theater as a form of religious endeavor and facilitated new types of dramatic theories and performances during the 16th and 17th centuries. She has also published articles on the Three Teachings, Pure Land Buddhism, ritual, print culture, and Daoist art.

Carolyn Wargula, Assistant Professor of Art History, Bucknell University
Carolyn Wargula specializes in Japanese Buddhist art with a focus on the materiality and intermediality of textiles, the social significances of the body, and the role of gendered ritual practices. Her forthcoming book project examines the mortuary practice of hair embroidery from the late twelfth- to the seventeenth-centuries to consider how the medium appealed particularly to women as a means to achieve enlightenment. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she will join Yale University as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council on East Asian Studies.

Aleksandra Wenta, Lecturer, Indology and Tibetology, University of Florence
Prior to joining the University of Florence, Aleksandra Wenta (PhD, University of Oxford) was an Assistant Professor and Founding Faculty in the School of Buddhist Studies, Philosophy, and Comparative Religions at Nalanda University (India). Her research interests include Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and aesthetics. Her monograph on the cult of Vajrabhairava is forthcoming from Boston, Wisdom Publications (Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism).

Chuck Wooldridge, Associate Professor, Lehman College, CUNY
Chuck Wooldridge is interested in urban history, religious history, and political culture. His recent research concerns iconoclasm, maintenance, and repair, especially in modern Taiwan. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2007, and has worked at Lehman since 2008, where he teaches East Asian and world history. He also serves as co-director of the Modern China Seminar at Columbia University. His first book, City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions (2015) concerns the ways different 19th century political movements sought to construct buildings, write history, and perform rituals to make the cityscape of Nanjing reflect their notions of ideal government.

Keping Wu, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University
Keping Wu is the co-editor of It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth (Berghahn 2019) and co-author of Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (Cambridge 2017). Her main area of research is religion and urbanization, religious and ethnic pluralism, and women spirit mediumship in contemporary China.

Laurel Kendall, Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections, American Museum of Natural History; Adjunct Professor, Columbia University; Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Laurel Kendall si a former President of the Association for Asian Studies (2016-2017). Kendall's work on Korean shamans describes how this living tradition has responded to the social, economic, and demographic transformation of South Korean society. Her recent book, Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masksin Asian Places (2021) draws on experiences ni Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali, Indonesia to explore the shared notion of ensouled images while tugging against any easy generalization.

Justin McDaniel, Kahn Endowed Chair of the Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Justin McDaniel's research foci include Lao, Thai, Pali and Sanskrit literature, art and architecture, and manuscript studies. His first book Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words (2008) won the Harry Benda Prize. His second book The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk (2011) won the Kahin Prize. His third book Architects of Buddhist Leisure (2016) was supported by grants from the NEH and Kyoto University. His recent work includes Wayward Distractions: Studies in Thai Buddhism (National University of Singapore and Kyoto University Presses, 2021) and eight edited volumes on Buddhist Material Culture, Buddhist Biographies, Buddhist Art, Buddhist Ritual, Buddhist Literature. He also is completing a new book on experimental pedagogy and an edited volume supported by the Templeton Foundation on the Humanities and Human Flourishing. He has published more than 100 articles and book reviews on a wide variety of subjects in Buddhist Studies, Material Culture, and Religious Studies. His work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Washington Post, New York Times, National Public Radio, CNN, and other news venues. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012, a fellow of Kyoto University's Center for Southeast Asian Studies in 2014, and one of the top ten most innovative professors in America by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. He has won several teaching awards at the University of California, Ohio University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, Princeton University
Thomas Conlan is a scholar of Japan from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. His books include In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan , State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan, From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan., and Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan: A Sourcebook 471-1877. His latest monograph, Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ōuchi Rule in Japan 1350-1569 is in production at Oxford University Press.

Jonathan C. Gold, Professor of Religion and Director of the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, Princeton University
A specialist in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, Jonathan C. Gold is the author of The Dharma’s Gatekeepers: Sakya Paṇḍita on Buddhist Scholarship in Tibet (2007) and Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu’s Unifying Buddhist Philosophy (2015). He is co-editor, with Douglas S. Duckworth, of Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra) (2019). In his current work he is developing a Buddhist approach to society, and politics. 

Bryan Lowe, Assistant Professor of Religion, Princeton University
Bryan Lowe specializes in Buddhism in ancient Japan (seventh through ninth centuries) and has broader research interests in ritual, manuscript studies, historiography, canons, and the religion of non-elites. Lowe’s first book, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan, received the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. His new project traces the rapid spread of Buddhism to the Japanese countryside between 650–850 CE.

Anna Shields, Professor of East Asian Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
Anna M. Shields received her A.M. (1990) from Harvard University and her Ph.D. (1998) from Indiana University. She specializes in classical Chinese literature of the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Northern Song eras. Her first book, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Collection from among the Flowers (Huajian ji), examined the emergence of the song lyric in a path-breaking anthology. Her second book, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China, explores the literary performance of friendship in ninth-century China through a wide range of genres. She is currently working on a new book that traces the shaping of the Tang dynasty literary legacy during the Five Dynasties and Northern Song. She is the co-editor, with Gil Raz, Dartmouth College, of the forthcoming volume, Religion and Poetry in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (Amsterdam UP, 2023).

Cheng-hua Wang, Associate Professor of Art and Archeology, Princeton University
Cheng-hua Wang has published widely in both Chinese and English. Her recently finished project is the book, Up the River of Time: The Original, Forgeries, and the Qingming Shanghe Painting Tradition in China. It tackles issues regarding the construction of a painting tradition through thematic links and the complicated relationship between a classical painting and its later “reproductions” from a long historical perspective. Her next book project will explore the concept of territoriality and the transformation of shanshui painting in eighteenth-century China involving three sites—the court, Suzhou, and Yangzhou.

Stephen F. Teiser, D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion, Princeton University
Stephen F. Teiser is interested in the transformations of Buddhism throughout Asia and focuses on Chinese-language materials. His most recent book is a monograph (in Chinese) on Buddhism and the study of ritual, Yilu yu fojiao yanjiu (Sanlian Publishers, 2022). Other books include an English translation of Chunwen Hao’s Dunhuang Manuscripts: An Introduction to Texts from the Silk Road (2020), Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (2006), The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (1994), and The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (1988).

Shih-shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor, Department of Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University
Shih-shan Susan Huang (Ph.D., History of Art, Yale) is the author of Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asian Center, 2012). A Chinese translation by Dr. Zhu Yiwen, Tuxie zhenxing: chuantong zhongguo de daojiao shijue wenhua, was published by Zhejiang University Press in 2022. Huang co-edited Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Period China with Patricia Ebrey (Brill, 2017). Her recent articles explore Song-to-Ming book art of the Lotus Sutra and Diamond Sutra, Buddhist printing under Tangut Xi Xia rule, and painting and printing connections. Huang's forthcoming monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors (in Brill series Crossroads - History of Interaction across the Silk Routes), examines printed images and texts as objects “on the move”, as they were transmitted along networks and book roads in a transnational context. For more information, visit https://shihshansusanhuang.com/.

Tentative dissertation topics are listed below their names. 

Briana Brightly, The Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University
The Buddhist Craftsman: Artisanal Epistemologies in Early-Modern Tibet

Yue Dai, Art History, Washington University in St. Louis
Between Esoteric and Permanently Revealed: A Qing-dynasty Ghost King Hanging Scroll from the White Cloud Monastery

Kehan Ding, Chinese, University of Edinburgh
Buddhist Monastic Tea in Song-Yuan China: A Deconstruction of Chan-tea Culture

Ilay Golan, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University Of Cambridge
Gods of the Sea: Religion, Profession, and Perception in Maritime Late Imperial China

Zirui Guo, Art History, Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts
Space, Ritual and Belief: The Study of Mogao Cave 148 at Dunhuang

Marielle Harrison, The Divinity School, University of Chicago
The Politics of Flesh in Early Mahāyāna Buddhism

Bryce Heatherly, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
Making, Offering, Building: Temporalities of Buddhist Relic Pagodas in Jiangnan, 850–1100

Xiang Hong, Centre of Buddhist Studies, The University of Hong Kong
A Critical Study and Annotated Translation of Fazhao’s Ritual Manual of the Five-Tempo Intonation of the Name of the Buddha for Recitation of Scripture and Contemplation of Pure Land

Sijia Huo, Chinese Religions, Thought and Arts, Fudan University
Colossal Maitreya Buddha Statues in the Tang Dynasty

Olga Kienzler, Institute for South and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University
Kucha Caves and Rituals: An Attempt at Linking Paintings and Texts of Defensive Magic

Chon Iat Lai, History, Tsinghua University, People’s Republic of China
Buddhism in the Southern and Northern Dynasties from the Perspectives of Laypeople:  Scripture, Rituals, and the Afterlife World

Yu-Chen Liou, Religious Studies, National Cheng-Chi University, Taiwan
The Development of Esoteric Buddhism In the Wake of the Middle Tang Dynasty: Rainmaking Rituals Transformation and Its Influence amongst Eastern Religions

Clara Ma, Art and Architectural History, University of Virginia
Localizing Sacredness: Imagery of Buddhist Divine Monks in the Visual Culture of Late Tang and Song China

Bryan Sauvadet, East Asian Language and Civilization, Université Paris Cité
The Evolution of Buddhist Art at the Korean Court in Connection with its Donors (14th to 16th Centuries)

Austin Simoes-Gomes, The Study of Religion, University of Toronto; and Rangjung Yeshe Institute
In the dyaḥmā's Living Rooms

Xuejing Sun, East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California
Arhat Grotto and Buddhist Monastery in Landscape: Material Culture of Chan Temples with Cliff-carvings of Arhats in China

Zonghui Wang, Center for Buddhist Art, Zhejiang University
A Case Study of mkhar rdzong Cave in mKhar rtse Valley, mNga’ ris

Xuemei Wu, Chinese History, Shaanxi Normal University
Pre-cultivation of Pure Land and Guidance to the Next Life: Interpretations and Reflections on the Western Xia Prints on Amitabha Buddha and its Related Images

Ting Zhang, Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Reception of Medieval Amitabha Pure Land Rituals

Jiayi Zhu, East Asian Languages and Civilization, University of Chicago
Repentance and Persisting Protection: Dhāraṇīs, Sutra Pillars and Stone Pagodas in East Asia around the 10th Century

Kentaro Ide, PhD Candidate, 7th-year, Department of Religion, Princeton University
Kentaro Ide specializes in Buddhism and religions in medieval Japan. His doctoral dissertation research offers an intellectual-social historical investigation of the influential medieval Buddhist discourse of the “salvation of evildoer,” addressing its philosophical bases, soteriological implications, and social contexts from the twelfth to fourteenth century Japan. This project aims especially at providing a nuanced picture of philosophy and practice of Hōnen (1133-1212), a Buddhist master who challenged the dominant Buddhist discourses of hierarchies of human capacities and conceptualized the radical egalitarianism in Buddhist terms.

Sinae Kim, PhD Candidate, 6th-year, Department of Religion, Princeton University
Sinae Kim’s research focuses on the history of religious practices in medieval China. In particular, she is interested in the dynamic relationship between Buddhist canonical texts, popular religious practices, and oral literary traditions. Her dissertation on preaching Buddhism in medieval China situates popular sūtra lectures within their textual, ritual, and social contexts by closely reading surviving “sūtra lecture texts” preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts together with a range of other sources such as sūtras, commentaries, ritual texts, anecdotes, and archaeological materials. Her study examines the network of preaching performance, which played an important role in popularizing Buddhism.

Junbin Tan, PhD Candidate, 5th-year, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
Junbin’s research interests lie at the intersection of religious affects, political subjectivities, and temporality. He is particularly interested in how relations with mediums, god-statues, and sacred figures/things reveal the workings of power beyond conventional, state-centered ones. His dissertation, based on 20 months of fieldwork on Kinmen–once Taiwan’s battlefront against China, and Taiwan’s most used border-crossing with China before the pandemic–, examines the forms of power and authority emergent in temple activities and religious practices, and how these relate to how Kinmenese think and feel about current political volatility at the Taiwan Strait and what it means to be “Chinese.”