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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.1 (2025): 313–317
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Asia-European Exchanges Mediated through Buddhism, Buddhism and Medicine: New Perspectives)
Contributor Biographies
T. H. BARRETT
Tim H. Barrett is Emeritus Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He studied Chinese at Cambridge and Buddhist Studies at Yale, and spent much of his career publishing on the history of the religious traditions of East Asia, primarily with regard to China. His books include Li Ao: Buddhist, Taoist, or Neo-Confucian? (1992), Taoism Under the T’ang (1996), The Woman Who Discovered Printing (2008), and From Religious Ideology to Political Expediency in Early Printing (2012).
Céline CODEREY
Céline Coderey is a socio-cultural anthropologist, Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Associate Researcher at the National University of Singapore. Her field of expertise spans from medical anthropology and anthropology of the body to anthropology of religion, but also to questions of identity in relation to performing arts, heritage making and temporalities. Her research is mainly focused on Myanmar and neighboring Southeast Asian countries, and on the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. Her work has been published in Medical Anthropology, Modern Asian Studies, Asian Medicine, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and she is the author of the upcoming book The Power of Remainder: Politics and Poetics of Healing in Myanmar (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2026). Her teaching includes the courses Biomedicine and Singapore society, Time and Life, Skin, The Sea is Us, Medical Anthropology, Pacific Island Cultures, Society and Environment, and Culture and Health.
Federico DIVINO
Federico Divino is a researcher at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on Buddhist medicine, particularly within the broader context of the history of medical thought. His approach is deeply rooted in medical anthropology and the semantic history of the concept of illness. He has served as a professor at the Master’s program in Death Studies at the University of Padua. He has contributed to the field through articles in medical history and religious studies journals, exploring early Buddhist medical thought. Most of his work has been published in AM. Rivista della Societa Italiana di Antropologia medica [Journal of the Italian Society of Medical Anthropology]. Furthermore, he examines modernity through an ethnographic lens, focusing on contemplative practice in clinical settings, which was the subject of a monograph published in 2021. Additionally, he investigates the relationship between contemplative practice and states of consciousness, an area of inquiry that formed the basis of his dual Ph.D. in Transcultural Studies and Social Sciences.
Richard ELLGUTH
Richard Ellguth is a postdoc at the Free University of Berlin. He has received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Chinese studies at Leipzig University. He is interested in religions in China from a perspective of global intellectual history with a particular focus on Chinese Buddhism. His recently defended doctoral dissertation is called ‘The Buddha in Plain Words: Chinese Buddhist Engagements with Western Religious Thought and the Transformation of Buddhist Language, 1912-1949’. In his new project, he investigates Chinese religious diasporas in Germany and their impact on both Chinese and German foreign policy.
Georgios T. HALKIAS
Georgios T. Halkias is Professor of Buddhism and the Director of the Centre of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He received his D.Phil. in 2006 from the University of Oxford focusing on Pure Land orientations in Tibetan contexts. His main research interests include the early transmission of Buddhism to Tibet, Himalayan Buddhism, Vajrayāna contemplative systems, and Buddhism and Hellenism in India and Central Asia. His book publications include, The Copper-Colored Mountain: Jigme Lingpa on Rebirth in Padmasambhava’s Pure Land (authored with C. Partsalaki, 2022), Pure Lands in Asian Texts and Contexts: An Anthology (ed. with R. Payne, 2019), Luminous Bliss: A Religious History of Pure Land Literature in Tibet. With an Annotated Translation and Critical Analysis of the Orgyen-ling golden short Sukhāvatīvyūha (2017/2013), among others. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Buddhism.
Elizabeth J. HARRIS
Elizabeth J. Harris is an honorary senior research fellow within the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK. Before retirement she was an Associate Professor in Religious Studies, specialising in Buddhist Studies, at Liverpool Hope University. She is currently President of the UK Association for Buddhist Studies and an International Adviser to the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. Her publications include: Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, missionary and colonial encounter in nineteenth century Sri Lanka (Routledge 2006) and Religion, Space and Conflict in Sri Lanka: colonial and postcolonial contexts (Routledge 2018). With John L. Crow she has co-written a biography of Allan Bennett/ Ananda Metteyya, one of the first British people to be ordained as a Buddhist monk (Equinox 2025).
Richard D. MCBRIDE II
Richard D. McBride II (Ph.D. UCLA, 2001) is Professor of Korean Studies and Buddhist Studies and Department Chair of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaŏm Synthesis in Silla Korea (2008), Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (2017), Aspiring to Enlightenment: Pure Land Buddhism in Silla Korea (2020), and The Three Kingdoms of Korea (2024). He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on Korean and Chinese Buddhism and early Korean history.
William A. MCGRATH
William A. McGrath is the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. His research primarily concerns the historical intersections of religion and medicine in Tibet and he recently co-edited the volume Histories of Tibet: Essays in Honor of Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp (2023).
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 archeology 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.
Stuart SARBACKER
Stuart Ray Sarbacker is a Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University, USA. His work centers on the relationships between the religious and philosophical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, especially with respect to mind-body discipline (yoga). He has written three books, including Samādhi: The Numinous and Cessative in Indo-Tibetan Yoga (SUNY Press), The Eight Limbs of Yoga: A Handbook for Living Yoga Philosophy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), and Tracing the Path of Yoga: The History and Philosophy of Indian Mind-Body Discipline (SUNY Press). He is a co-founder of the American Academy of Religion’s Yoga in Theory and Practice unit. Professor Sarbacker is an active yoga practitioner and teacher, having trained extensively in India, Japan, and the United States.
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.
Rafal K. STEPIEN
Rafal K. Stepien is a Principal Researcher at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia within the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where he leads a research project in Chinese Buddhist philosophy (ChinBuddhPhil) funded by the European Research Council. He is concurrently Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. Previously, Rafal was the inaugural Berggruen Research Fellow in Indian Philosophy at the University of Oxford, the inaugural Cihui Foundation Faculty Fellow in Chinese Buddhism at Columbia University, a Humboldt Research Fellow in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University, the Soudavar Memorial Research Scholar in Persian Studies at the University of Cambridge, Assistant Professor of Asian Religions at Hampshire College, and Assistant Professor in Comparative Religion at Nanyang Technological University. His latest book is Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford University Press, 2024).
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