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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.1 (2024): 342–346
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhism and Science, Transmission of Buddhism: Locality and Globality)
Contributor Biographies
Jessica FALCONE
Dr. Jessica Marie Falcone is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. With a research orientation toward contemporary transnational Asian religious cultures, she has done fieldwork across Asia and its diasporas. Her first book, Battling the Buddha of Love: the Greatest Statue Never Built, about a controversial giant statue project in India, was published in 2018 by Cornell University Press. She is currently working on a monograph about the rich contemporary ritual and social life of a Soto Zen Buddhist temple in Hawai‘i that was founded by Japanese migrants over a hundred years ago.
Imre GALAMBOS
Imre Galambos specialises in the study of medieval Chinese manuscripts from sites in northwestern China. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the structure of Chinese characters in the pre-Qin period. For the following ten years he worked for the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library, as a result of which his research gradually shifted to medieval manuscripts from Dunhuang. Between 2012 and 2023, he taught at the University of Cambridge, after which he became a professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Among his main interests is the dynamics of the spread of texts and manuscripts along the multilingual networks known today as the Silk Roads. His books include Orthography of Early Chinese Writing (2006); Manuscripts and Travellers (co-authored with Sam van Schaik, 2012), Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture (2015), and Dunhuang Manuscript Culture (2020).
Sung-Eun T. KIM
Sung-Eun Thomas KIM is an assistant professor at the Academy of Buddhist Studies, Dongguk University, and an assistant editor for the International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Seoul National University. Previously, he has held research posts at the University of British Columbia and Leiden University. His academic interests lie in the social history of Korean Buddhism during the Chosŏn dynasty period (1392–1910). In particular he is currently working on a project on the rise and formation of Korean Buddhism during the early seventeenth century from the perspective of institutional developments such as monastic education, system of cultivation, and socio-cultural foundations of support (funded by the Academy of Korean Studies). Some of his representative publications include an annotated translation, Buddhist Apologetics in Early Modern Korea: Treaties and Memorials by Joseon Period Monks (2020); ‘Taming the Tiger of Hwadu Absolutism: Kanhwa Sŏn/Chan Practices Understood From the Perspective of Ritual Practice and Experience’ (2021); and ‘Korean Buddhist Adoption of Shamanic Religious Ethos: Healing, Fortune Seeking, and the Afterlife’ (2018).
Jeffrey KOTYK
Jeffrey Kotyk (Ph.D., Leiden University, 2017) has researched the relationship between China and the wider world in late antiquity with a particular focus on the eastward transmission of sciences (astronomy, astrology, medicine, and metallurgy) to East Asia. His research has also covered Buddhist Studies and Japanese history. His recent survey, ‘Astrology and Astral Magic in Tantric Japan’ appears in The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies (2024). He is presently participating in the Dept. III Working Group ‘Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa (4000 BCE–1700 CE)’, where he is contributing to the database and authoring a book on cosmology in premodern East Asia. He is the author of Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity: China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium (Brill, 2024), a comprehensive study on the historical relations between West and East Asia. He has published studies in journals such as T’oung Pao, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and Asia Major. He has held grants and scholarships from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Sheng Yen Education Foundation, Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, and Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai. In the past, he has translated academic publications from Chinese and Japanese into English. He also has translated Classical Buddhist Chinese texts.
Sara LAWS
Sara Laws is a scholar of poetry. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Oklahoma and has authored articles in Criticism, in the book collection Poet in Place and Time, and in the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies. Laws has lectured on American poetry and American Buddhisms at Mongolia International University, Beijing Normal University, and American University. Currently, she teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Jingjing LI 李晶晶
Jingjing Li is Assistant Professor (Universitair docent) at Leiden University’s Institute for Philosophy. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 2019 and has been working at Leiden University ever since. She is the author of Comparing Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogācāra in a Multicultural World: A Journey beyond Orientalism (Bloomsbury 2022). Currently, she is working on the project ‘A Lost Pearl: Feminist Theories in Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness-only’, which has been awarded a Veni Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Jackson MACOR
Jackson Macor is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Group in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in the reception of Madhyamaka thought in East Asia. He previously received a B.A. in Mathematics, a B.A. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations (2017), and an M.A. in Divinity (2020) from the University of Chicago, supplemented by language study in India and Japan. His doctoral research is focused on the writings of the Sui dynasty exegete Jizang (549-623). He currently resides in Tokyo, Japan as a research fellow at Komazawa University.
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 Premodern 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.
Kiril SOLONIN
Kirill Solonin earned his doctorate from St. Petersburg University. Since the early 1990s, he was working on the issues of the Tangut language, and Tangut and Sino-Tibetan Buddhism. He worked in several institutions in Russia, Germany, USA and China. He is currently a professor in the School of Chinese Classics at Renmin University of China.
TAN Yingxian 談穎嫻
Yingxian Tan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on state and Buddhism in late sixth and early seventh century China, particularly during the Western Wei-Northern Zhou and Sui periods. Her doctoral dissertation explores the relationship between the emperors and the saṅgha in the Sui dynasty, analyzing perspectives from both sides.
Caiyang XU 徐采揚
Caiyang Xu is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University. Her research explores the cultural history of Chinese Buddhism, with a focus on topics ranging from the intersections of modern Chinese Buddhism and politics to the esoteric rituals of food bestowal in late imperial China.
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