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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 6.1 (2023): 398–403
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Narrative Literature)
Contributor Biographies
Marcus BINGENHEIMER
Marcus Bingenheimer 馬德偉 is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. He taught Buddhism and Digital Humanities in Taiwan at Dharma Drum (2005 to 2011) and held visiting positions and fellowships at universities in Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and France. Since 2001 he has supervised various projects concerning the digitisation of Buddhist culture. His main research interests are the history and historiography of Buddhism, early sūtra literature, and how to apply computational approaches to research in the Humanities. In the last twenty years he has published a handful of books and more than sixty articles.
Jason CARBINE
Jason (Jake) Carbine is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Whittier College. His primary area of scholarly expertise is Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, with a research specialisation in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and also with a comparative interest in parts of China. He has conducted field research in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, with an emphasis on ritual, practice, and religious spaces. He has also led study abroad programs in various parts of Asia (Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Southwest China). Overall, his teaching and research in the study of Theravada Buddhism and other Asian religions combines historical and ethnographic methodologies and draws from an interdisciplinary body of research pertaining to the history of religions, textual studies, anthropology, comparative religious ethics, and environmental studies. He teaches a range of courses dealing with Asian religions from India to Japan, method and theory in the study of religion, Asian religion and society, globalisation, and the environment.
Chiew Hui HO 何秋輝
Chiew Hui Ho is Senior Lecturer in East Asian Buddhism at the University of Sydney. He specialises in Chinese Buddhism with a focus on Buddhism in Medieval China. His area of research is the sociocultural history of Buddhism in China, especially how Buddhism was lived and practised on the ground by the laity. His first book, Diamond Sutra Narratives: Textual Production and Lay Religiosity in Medieval China, examines the role of the laity in shaping the Tang Diamond Sūtra cult by studying a substantial body of narratives extolling the sūtra in the Tang dynasty (618–907). Deeply interested in the interaction between storytelling, textual production, ritual, and material culture, he continues to study medieval Chinese Buddhist narratives related to different systems of scriptural devotion. He has published on various topics, including Buddhist philosophy, the relationship between iconography and ritual, and narratives of the Lotus Sūtra. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Buddhist Studies) from Stanford University.
Chin-fung NG 伍展楓
Chin-fung Ng is currently a Ph.D. student in Sinology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. After graduating from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in Chinese Language and Literature, he obtained his master’s degree in Chinese Studies from Leipzig University in Germany with a thesis focusing on the poetry and academic works of Zhang Ruzhao 張汝釗 (1900– 1969), a revolutionary heroine turned Buddhist nun and pioneer activist of the feminist movement in 20th century China. Under the supervision of Prof. Zhiyi Yang 楊治宜, Ng’s current major area of research is classical Chinese literature related to Buddhism, especially poetry, during the late Qing and Republican periods.
Ulrike ROESLER
Ulrike Roesler is Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford, where she has been teaching since 2010. After a Ph.D. in Indian Studies from the University of Münster (Germany), she obtained the Habilitation in Tibetan Studies from the University of Munich (Germany). At Oxford, she founded the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Centre at Wolfson College in 2012. Her research interests include religious and cultural interactions between India and Tibet, the period of the ‘later diffusion’ of Buddhism in Tibet (late tenth to thirteenth centuries), and Tibetan historical, biographical, and narrative literature. Among her book publications are Lives Lived, Lives Imagined: Biography in the Buddhist Traditions (2010), Frühe Quellen zum buddhistischen Stufenweg in Tibet [Early Sources on the Graded Path to Awakening in Tibet] (2011), and Tibetan and Himalayan Healing (2015). At present, she is working on a monograph on the emergence of monasticism on the Tibetan plateau and the formation of the Kadampa school of Tibetan Buddhism.
Peter SKILLING
Peter Skilling is a Special Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, Maharashtra, India, and an Honorary Associate, Department of Indian Sub-Continental Studies, University of Sydney, Australia. Until his retirement in 2017, he was a Professor of the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO). He specialises in the literary and material history of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia. He publishes widely and has been visiting professor at leading universities worldwide. His recent book, Questioning the Buddha (Wisdom Books, 2021), contains translations of twenty-five from the Tibetan Kanjur. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Buddha’s Words for Tough Times, translates twenty sūtras from Tibetan and Pāli.
Ben VAN OVERMEIRE
Ben Van Overmeire is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke Kunshan University. A comparatist, he examines how premodern Zen Buddhist genres, ideas and practices are understood today, particularly in popular literature. He has just finished a book manuscript on American Zen autobiography, describing how and why such narratives incorporate kōan, Zen riddles revolving around seemingly unsolvable questions such as ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’. His next project examines Buddhism and outer space. His work has appeared in Religions, Contemporary Buddhism, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Buddhist-Christian Studies, among other journals. Van Overmeire has presented his work at the annual conferences of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Modern Languages Association (MLA), and the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). He is a steering member of the Buddhist Pedagogy seminar at AAR, blogs on benvanovermeire.com, and tweets @Zenmirrors.
Ji Ho YI 李智浩
Ji Ho Yi studied Economics and Art History at Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, and completed her M.A. in Art History at Seoul National University. She worked between 2012 and 2013 at the Kyujanggak Institute of Korean Studies as a manager of the exhibition space. Since November 2018, Ji Ho has been studying under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Monika Zin at the Universität Leipzig, conducting her research for her Ph.D. project on the monk and nun images painted in the Buddhist caves of ancient Kucha. She has worked as a doctoral student in the project group ‘Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road’ at the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig since March 2019.
Haoqin ZHONG 鍾昊沁
Haoqin Zhong received her Ph.D. at the Center of Buddhist Studies of the University of Hong Kong. She received her B.S. and M.S. from Peking University, and Tsinghua University respectively. Her research interests include Buddhist narrative literature, feminist Buddhism, early Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, Vinaya Studies, and comparative religions.
Monika ZIN
Prof. Monika Zin is the head of the research group ‘Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road’ at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, Germany. She studied Dramatics, Literature, Art History, and Indology in Krakow and Munich where she also taught Art of South and Central Asia for twenty-five years. Zin’s dissertation focussed on the Sanskrit dramas discovered in Trivandrum; for her second dissertation (Habilitation) she studied the paintings at Ajanta. Among her research contributions are monographs (Ajanta – Handbook of the Paintings 2: Devotional and Ornamental Paintings, Wiesbaden 2003; Compassion and Miracles. Difficult Conversions and their Iconography in Indian Buddhism, Wiesbaden 2007; [with Dieter Schlingloff] Saṃsāracakra. The Wheel of Rebirth in the Indian Tradition, Munich 2007; all written in German; the English edition of Saṃsāracakra. The Wheel of Rebirth in the Indian Tradition was published in 2022) as well as numerous shorter studies on Buddhist narrative art ranging from Kucha in Central Asia to Borobudur on Java. One of her long-term research interests is the art of ancient Āndhradeśa; her book on the stūpa at Kanaganahalli (Karnataka) was published in Delhi in 2018. Her book Representations of the Parinirvāṇa Story Cycle in Kucha, the second volume of the Leipzig Kucha Studies, was published in 2020. Her Gods, Deities and Demons in the Paintings of Kucha was published in 2023 and won the prestigious Keimyung Silk Road Award 2023.
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