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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.2 (2025): 394–398
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History)
Contributor Biographies
Stephanie BALKWILL
Stephanie Balkwill is Associate Professor of Chinese Buddhism at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is also the Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies. She conducts research on the intellectual, public, and religious lives of women who lived between the fourth and sixth centuries and in the area of the world that we now call China.
Megan BRYSON
Megan Bryson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests include East Asian Buddhism, Buddhist transmission, Buddhism in the Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms, religion in Yunnan, and the themes of ethnicity and gender in the study of East Asian religions. She has published the books Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford UP, 2016) and (co-edited with Kevin Buckelew) Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia UP, 2023).
Alice COLLETT
Alice Collett’s research specialism is ancient Indian religions, with a focus on women. Her publications include Women in Early Indian Buddhism: Comparative Textual Studies (OUP, 2013), Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biography as History (OUP 2016) and Translating Buddhism: Historical and Contextual Perspectives (SUNY, 2021).
Lisa KOCHINSKI
Lisa Kochinski earned her M.A. at Kyushu University in 2015 and received her Ph.D. from the School of Religion at the University of Southern California in 2024. She specializes in premodern Japanese religions, with research interests in Buddhist ritual and memorial culture, inter-regional exchange and transmission, and death and disaster ritual. Her dissertation traces the development of the Zen segaki 施餓鬼 ghost-feeding ritual in the late medieval period. By highlighting ritual as a response to suffering, death, and grief in periods of warfare and famine, she places the development of segaki in historical context and, in so doing, sheds light on the broader religious landscape of late medieval Japan. Lisa is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California, where she is revising her dissertation for publication.
Lan LI
Lan Li is currently a sessional instructor at the University of Toronto. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University in 2024, specializing in Buddhism and East Asian religions. Her research examines donative epigraphy and religious patronage in medieval China, with a particular focus on the interconnections between funerary practices, gender, and family in Chinese Buddhism. Drawing on inscriptions from the Longmen Grottoes, her dissertation reconstructs the religious and social lives of donors while tracing the dynamic history of Tang Buddhist practices. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as an assistant researcher at the Longmen Grottoes Research Academy (2010–2018) and published several papers and archaeological reports based on her fieldwork there.
Chia-Wei LIN
Lin, Chia-Wei is a graduate assistant (assistante diplômée) and Ph.D. student at the Section de langues et civilisations slaves et de l’Asie du Sud, Université de Lausanne. Her research interests include historical linguistics, language contact, indigenous grammatical traditions, Christian and Buddhist translations on the Silk Road. Her dissertation project examines the Arabic, Georgian, and Greek translations of Barlaam and Josaphat.
Kate LINGLEY
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.
Alessandro POLETTO
Alessandro Poletto specializes in the social and religious history of premodern Japan, with an emphasis on Buddhism in the early medieval period (approx. tenth to the thirteenth century). He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2020 with a dissertation entitled ‘The Culture of Healing in Early Medieval Japan: A Study in Pre-modern Epistemology’, in which he examined discourses and practices concerning healing and disease, with particular attention to the relationship between Buddhist healers and other technicians involved in the treatment of illness, namely court physicians and onmyōji. His other research and teaching interests include the understanding and ritual resolution of natural disasters in premodern East Asia, the history of the cultural exchanges between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, and Buddhist material culture and archaeology in East Asia. Before joining Washington University in St. Louis as a lecturer in East Asian religions, he was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University.
Bruno M. SHIRLEY
Bruno M. Shirley is a historian of medieval Sri Lanka, interested in the intersection of religion, gender, and politics. He is currently adjunct lecturer at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany.
Przemysław SKRZYŃSKI
Przemysław Skrzyński, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant at the Institute for the Study of Religions, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. His teaching comprises both religious and cultural studies, including contemporary Buddhism, presence of religious themes in art, research into religious archives, and Religious Studies methodology. His main research interests include the ritual and symbolic acculturation of oriental religions in Western cultural communities, the sociology of communities, and Buddhist-Christian interreligious dialogue. He is currently completing work on his book about the first Buddhist communities in Poland. He also works as a staff member at the Kyoto-Kraków Foundation, which houses legacy of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda.
Alexander SOGO
Alexander Sogo is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Religions at Columbia University and an adjunct lecturer in Classical, Middle Eastern, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Queens College City University of New York. His research examines the interactions between religion and the state in ancient Japan through a focus on the body. He is particularly interested in topics related to healing and disability in the premodern world, and his current work emphasizes cultural responses to bodily abnormality, patterns of Buddhist social welfare, and the materiality of medical practice in early Japan.
Trent WALKER
Trent Walker is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Thai Professor of Theravada Buddhism in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. A specialist in Southeast Asian literature, religion, and music, his publications include numerous articles on Thai, Lao, Khmer, Pali, and Vietnam-ese Buddhist texts and recitation practices. He is the author of Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (2022, winner of the 2024 Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation) and the co-editor of Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (2022).
Jakub ZAMORSKI
Jakub Zamorski is an assistant professor of East Asian Buddhism at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He researches and publishes on doctrinal and intellectual history of Pure Land Buddhism in early modern and modern China and Japan, on the reception of Buddhist logic and epistemology in East Asia and occasionally on other topics related to Chinese and Japanese Buddhist thought. He has contributed articles to, for example, Journal of Chinese Buddhist Studies, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens, chapters in edited volumes and essays in encyclopaedias (including Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, forthcoming).
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