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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.2 (2024): 342–346
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions)
Contributor Biographies
James BENN 貝劍鳴
James Benn is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. His field of research is religion in medieval China (roughly fourth to tenth century, CE). To date, he has concentrated on three major areas of interest: bodily practice in Chinese Religions; the creation and transmission of new religious practices and doctrines; and the religious dimensions of commodity culture. In particular, he has focused on self-immolation, Chinese Buddhist apocrypha, and the history of tea. He works with primary sources written in literary Chinese and his research engages with that of scholars who publish in English and French as well as in modern Chinese and Japanese. Although his work is grounded in traditional Sinology—a discipline based on knowledge of the literature, history, and culture of pre-modern China—his publications are also aimed towards scholars of Religious Studies.
Wen-shing CHOU 周文欣
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
Susan Dine of Vanderbilt University 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.
Shih-shan Susan HUANG 黃士珊
Shih-shan Susan Huang (Ph.D., History of Art, Yale), Associate Professor, Department of Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University. Huang 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. She 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 Sūtra and Diamond Sūtra, Buddhist printing under Tangut Xi Xia rule, and painting and printing connections. Huang’s monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors (Brill, 2024), 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.
Kate A. LINGLEY ⿓梅若
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 劉婧瑜
Dr. Jingyu Liu is an Assistant Professor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, specializing in Asian religions, particularly Chinese religious interactions and rituals. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where her research focused on universal salvation rituals in medieval China. Dr. Liu has extensive experience teaching East Asian history and religions. Her research interests include the intersection of Buddhist and Daoist practices, transnational religious exchanges, and ritual and society.
Shu-fen LIU 劉淑芬
Shu-fen Liu received her Ph.D. in History at National Taiwan University. She has conducted research on the history of medieval China and the social history of Buddhism from the third to the thirteenth century, which resulted in the monographs Cities and Societies in the Six Dynasties (Nanjing University Press, 2021), Compassion and Purity: Buddhism and Medieval Social Life (Revised Second Edition, Sanmin Publishing House, 2019), Expunging Sin and Saving the Deceased: A Study of the Buddha Uṣṇīṣa Vijayā Dhāraṇī Sūtra Pillars (Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2008). Her recent research focuses on Xuanzang and Arhat worship.
Chihiro SAKA 坂知尋
After completing her M.A. in Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, Chihiro Saka received her Ph.D. 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.
Stephen F. TEISER 太史文
Stephen F. Teiser, D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion, Princeton University. He 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).
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 Vietnamese 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).
Carolyn WARGULA
Carolyn Wargula (Assistant Professor of Art History, Bucknell University) 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, Embodied Embroideries: Gender, Agency, and the Body in Japanese Buddhism, examines the mortuary practice of hair embroidery from the late twelfth- to the seventeenth-centuries. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, she served as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University.
Echo WENG 翁程聲
Echo Weng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the conceptions of the body and disability in medieval Chinese Buddhism. In particular, her dissertation examines how medieval Chinese people understood diverse forms of embodiment, including illness, deformity, and disability, as well as the practices they employed to address various bodily afflictions.
Chuck WOOLDRIDGE 吳克強
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 Ph.D. 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 nineteenth century political movements sought to construct buildings, write history, and perform rituals to make the cityscape of Nanjing reflect their notions of ideal government.
Jiang WU 吳疆
Dr. Jiang Wu is currently a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, director of Center for Buddhist Studies. He received his Master’s degree from Nankai University (1994) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2002). His research interests include seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhism, especially Chan/Zen Buddhism, the role of Buddhist canons in the formation of East Asian Buddhist culture, and the historical exchanges between Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism. He has published articles in Asia Major, Journal of East Asian History, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Monumenta Serica on a variety of topics. His first book Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-century China was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. His Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia (Oxford, 2016) won the inaugural Tianzhu Best Book in Chan Studies Award. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
Keping WU 吳科萍
Keping Wu is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. She 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.
Wenxuan YANG 楊文渲
Wenxuan Yang is a research assistant at Duke Kunshan University, and worked previously at Trinity College Dublin and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She obtained BSc in Computer Software Engineering at Fudan University, and BA German at Jiangsu University of Technology.
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