Author Biographies, Issue 1.2
Abstract
Sonja Arntzen is Professor Emerita in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include kanshi, the Chinese poetry written by Japanese authors throughout the pre-modern era into the modern period, and women’s writing in the Heian period. Since her retirement in 2005, she has remained active in research and literary translation. Her 1986 Ikkyū and the Crazy Cloud Anthology has been revised and expanded for a reprint edition by Quirin Press, 2022. The Sarashina Diary: A Woman’s Life in Eleventh-Century Japan, which she co-authored with Itō Moriyuki, was republished in paperback with an abridged introduction in 2018 by Columbia University Press. The Kagerō Diary: A Women’s Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century Japan, published by the University of Michigan in 1997, remains in print. In November 2021, she introduced nine hundred years of Japanese poetry in twenty minutes for a Zoom session entitled “Japanese Poetry Beyond Haiku” sponsored by the Daiwa Anglo-Japan Foundation in London. The session can be accessed through youtube: https://youtu.be/xN1F1SvSiyU. She is currently working on a new translation of the Ochikubo monogatari, working title, Lady of the Low Chamber.
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), From Religious Ideology to Political Expediency in Early Printing (2012), and A Monkey Jumps and Britain Awakens to Mahayana: Aspects of the Westward Spread of Chinese Buddhism (2024).
James Benn (PhD UCLA 2001) is Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at McMaster University and Director of the McMaster University Centre for Buddhist Studies. He studies Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China. He has published on self-immolation, spontaneous human combustion, Buddhist apocryphal scriptures, and tea and alcohol in medieval China in journals such as History of Religions, T’oung Pao, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. He is the author of Burning for the Buddha: Self-immolation in Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007) and Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). The authorized translation of Tea in China is now available: Cha zai Zhongguo: yibu zongjiao yu wenhua shi 茶在中国:一部宗教与文化史. Translated by Zhu Huiying 朱慧颖. Beijing: Zhongguo gongren chubanshe 中國工人出版社, 2019. He is currently working on a translation and study of the Śūramgama sutra, a Chinese Buddhist apocryphon.
Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is a research associate with the Hidden Stories project at the University of Toronto and Princeton University. Originally from western Sikkim, he studies human and more-than-human histories and engagements in the Himalayas.
Daryl Jamieson is a freelance composer and assistant researcher in Japanese aesthetics at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. In 2018, he received the Toshi Ichiyanagi Contemporary Prize for the third of his Vanitas music-theatre trilogy. He composes for both Japanese and western instruments, and his music reflects his study of nō theatre. His music—available from the Canadian Music Centre and Da Vinci Edition—has been widely performed in Asia, North America, and Europe. He also co-founded music theatre company and record label “atelier jaku.” http://daryljamieson.com https://atelierjaku.com/.
Beverley McGuire is Professor of East Asian Religions at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Her book Living Karma (Columbia University Press, 2014) examined an important but overlooked figure in Chinese Buddhist history, a monk named Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655) who engaged in a variety of religious practices to try to change his karma, including repentance rituals that are ubiquitous in contemporary China, Taiwan, and Chinese diaspora communities. She has co-edited a volume entitled Teaching Critical Religious Studies: Pedagogy and Critique in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2023). She has also published articles in the Journal of Chinese Religions, Journal of Chinese Buddhist Studies, Material Religion, Religion Compass, and Teaching Theology and Religion.
Brian J. Nichols is a professor in the department of Humanities and coordinator of the Religious Studies program at Mount Royal University in Calgary. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies with a concentration in Buddhism from Rice University. His book Lotus Blossoms and Purple Clouds: Monastic Buddhism in Post-Mao China, published by University of Hawai'i Press in 2022, draws on ethnographic study and non-canonical sources to broaden the conception of Buddhist monasticism as a lived tradition. In addition to Buddhism in contemporary China, his interests included the emerging fields of ecodharma, the intersection of Buddhism and ecology, and contemplative studies.
Quảng Huyền 廣玄 is a practitioner of Buddhism from the Seven Mountains region in the Mekong Delta. He received tonsure in 2007 and has since shared the Dharma with communities in both Vietnam and the United States, including with the publication of Dharma Mountain Buddhism and Martial Yoga (2010) and a translation of the vernacular teachings of Venerable Master Buddha of Western Peace Pagoda (2020). Later, taking interest in the academic study of Buddhism, he pursued a graduate degree at Cornell University, where he earned his doctorate in Vietnamese Literature, Religion, and Culture in 2021. Currently, he serves as senior lecturer of Vietnamese history and culture at VinUniversity, Hanoi. In addition to continuing to share the Dharma and teaching undergraduates in Vietnam, he conducts research on embodied cultural traditions in Vietnam such as spirit possession and martial arts, as well as environmental history and endemic religious practitioners’ interactions with ongoing ecological issues in the Mekong Delta.
Rolf Scheuermann is a research fellow at the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, “Epochal Lifeworlds–Narratives of Crisis and Change,” at Heidelberg University, Germany. He obtained a doctorate in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies from the University of Vienna and previously worked as a research coordinator at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University, and at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities, “Fate, Freedom and Prognostication: Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe (IKGF).” In the 2024 summer term, he served as Locum Professor of Tibetan Studies at LMU Munich, and from April 2017 to September 2018, he substituted as the Junior Professor of Central Asian Studies at the University of Leipzig. His previous publications have focussed on Buddhist environmentalism, Tibetan strategies for coping with the future, Tibetan eschatology, the early Tibetan bKa’ brgyud tradition, the Jo nang tradition’s gZhan stong-Mādhyamaka philosophy, and the translation of Buddhist canonical works.
Sharon R. Wesoky is Professor of Political Science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Most recently, she served as the editor and chief translator of Chinese Modernity and Socialist Feminist Theory, a book collecting the writings of contemporary Chinese feminist theorist Song Shaopeng. She is also a graduate of Upaya Zen Center’s training in Buddhist chaplaincy, and volunteers teaching meditation to incarcerated women.
Jeff Wilson serves as Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. He is also in the process of pursuing a Master of Environmental Studies in Social and Ecological Sustainability, in the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. Wilson’s published books include Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America (Oxford University Press, 2009).
