Lisa Battaglia

Dr. Battaglia is a comparative religionist with scholarly interest in Asian religions, and especially contemporary Buddhist movements in Southeast Asia. Her research has focused on women’s ordination in Theravada Buddhism, women’s alternative renunciant communities in Buddhist Thailand, and, most recently, representations of beauty and the female body in Buddhism. Dr. Battaglia’s research interests lie at the intersection of Asian religious traditions and critical methods in the study of religion. She is particularly interested in the contemporary movement for women’s full monastic ordination in Buddhist countries, aptly termed the “bhikkhuni movement.” Her research aims to develop a dialogical model for exploring western feminist critique and indigenous Buddhist subjectivities. A key concern of her scholarship is how gender, sexuality, human rights, and religious vocation translate across cultures and cultural domains. Her fieldwork and research have taken her throughout Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Malaysia. Dr. Battaglia received her B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. from the University of Alabama, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.

Jessey Choo

Jessey Choo (Ph.D., Princeton) is Associate Professor of Chinese History and Religion at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is a historian who specializes in the Chinese Middle Ages (200–1000 CE) and Chinese popular religions. Her research focuses on cultural and religious practices associated with childbearing and death, as well as women’s acquisition and exercise of personal agency in everyday life. Her first book, Inscribing Death: Burials, Representations, and Remembrance in Tang China, 618–907 CE (University of Hawaii Press, 2022) examines the uses and limits of burial and entombed epitaph inscriptions in (re-)fashioning identities and memories. Her next book, titled “The Blood Debts: Childbearing and Women's Salvation in Chinese Religions, 1000–1500," will trace the emergence and popularization of a Buddho-Daoist soteriology centering on childbearing and the Blood Lake Hell. She is also the co-editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji (Hackett Publishing Co., 2017).

Pascale Engelmajer

Pascale F. Engelmajer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of History, Politics and Religious Studies at Carroll University in Wisconsin. She is the author of Women in Pāli Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Path in Mutual Dependence (Routledge) a book that examines women’s spiritual agency, and Buddhism (Hodder and Stoughton) an introduction that provides an understanding of how doctrine informs practice in the contemporary Buddhist world by describing day-to-day practices as the basis for an examination of the history, doctrines, and practices of Buddhism. She has published numerous book chapters and articles on women and Buddhism. Her recent research adopts a matricentric feminist approach based on the work of Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick and Andrea O’Reilly to explore how mothering can be described as a way to embody the Buddhist path in the ancient Pāli Buddhist texts. In that context, she has been working with an informal research network on motherhood/mothering and religion, participating in, and organizing workshops both in North America and Europe.

Sarah Jacoby

Sarah H. Jacoby is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She specializes in Tibetan Buddhist studies, with research interests in Buddhist revelation (gter ma), religious auto/biography, Tibetan literature, gender and sexuality, the history of emotions, and the history of eastern Tibet. She is the author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), co-author of Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-editor of Buddhism Beyond the Monastery: Tantric Practices and their Performers in Tibet and the Himalayas (Brill, 2009). She has recently published articles on motherhood in Tibetan Buddhism, and currently she is working on a full Tibetan-English translation of Sera Khandro’s autobiography, among other projects. At Northwestern, she teaches a range of Buddhist Studies courses for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Keller Kimbrough

Keller Kimbrough is Professor of Japanese and Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a native of Colorado and Tennessee. He earned his BA in English at Colorado College (1990) and his MA and PhD degrees in Japanese Literature from Columbia University and Yale (1994 and 1999). His publications include Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Japan (2008), Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (2013), and Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds: A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales, co-edited with Haruo Shirane (2018).

Reiko Ohnuma

Reiko Ohnuma is the Robert 1932 and Barbara Black Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, where she has taught for over two decades. She is a specialist in the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, with a particular focus on narrative literature preserved in Sanskrit and Pali. Her work has focused on the themes of the body, gender, sexuality, and animality. She holds a B.A. from the University of California (Berkeley) and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She is the author of Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (Columbia University Press, 2007); Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2012); and Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Jin Y. Park

Jin Y. Park is Professor of Buddhist and intercultural philosophy and the Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University. She specializes in East Asian Buddhism (especially Zen and Huayan), Buddhist ethics, intercultural philosophy, and modern East Asian philosophy. Park employs Buddhism to engage with contemporary issues with a special focus on gender, power, violence, and marginality. Her research on modern East Asian philosophy examines the dawn of philosophy in East Asia and the East-West encounter in that context. She is the author, translator or editor of over ten books including Women and Buddhist Philosophy (2017); Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun (trans. 2014); and Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism (ed.2010). Park currently serves as the President-Elect of the American Academy of Religion and the President of the North American Korean Philosophy Association. She also served as the President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (2018-2019), was a board member of the Board of Directors (2013-2015) of the American Academy of Religion, and the Founding Director of the International Society for Buddhist Philosophy (2001-2018).

Melody Rod-ari

Melody Rod-ari received her B.A. and M.A. in art history and museum studies from Boston University, and her Ph.D. in art history from UCLA. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Loyola Marymount University. Melody is also the Southeast Asian Content Editor for Smarthistory as well as an active curator who has organized exhibitions and permanent galleries for the Norton Simon Museum and the USC, Pacific Asia Museum. Her research investigates modern and contemporary Buddhist visual culture in Thailand, and the history of collecting South and Southeast Asian art in American and European museums. Her work has been published by various journals and university presses and include topics such as “Who Owns Ban Chiang?: The Discovery, Collection and Repatriation of Ban Chiang Artefacts” (NUS Press, 2019) and “The Origins of the Emerald Buddha” (DK Printworld, 2020).

Vanessa R. Sasson

Vanessa R. Sasson is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts Department of Marianopolis College where she has been teaching since 1999. She is also a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State and Research Member at CERIAS at UQAM. She has published widely as a scholar in her field. Her most recent edited volume is titled, Jewels, Jewelry, and Other Shiny Things in the Buddhist Imaginary (Hawaii University Press, 2021). Yasodhara and the Buddha (Bloomsbury, 2021) is her first academic novel; it is followed by The Gathering (Equinox 2023), which focuses on the women’s request for ordination. She has a forthcoming edited volume with Kristin Scheible, entitled The Buddha: A Storied Life (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Jessica Starling

Jessica Starling received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and subsequently served as the Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Religious Studies department of Lewis & Clark College in 2013. Her research focuses on the intersection of Buddhist doctrine, gender, family, ethics, emotion, and material practices in Japan. Starling’s first monograph, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in the Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), was an ethnographic account of temple wives in the True Pure Land Buddhist School (Jōdo Shinshū). Her work has appeared in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Global Buddhism, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She has received numerous fellowships in support of her research, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Japan Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. She currently serves as co-chair of the Japanese Religions Unit Steering Committee for the American Academy of Religion, and co-editor of the Buddhism section of Religion Compass.

John Szostak

John Szostak’s primary research focus is modern Japanese art history. He did his PhD research as a Fulbright fellow at Kyoto University, studying early 20th century Kyoto-based Nihonga (neotraditional) painters and their professional networks. His research has been funded by the Japan Studies Endowment (UH-Mānoa), the University Research Council (UH-Mānoa), and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies. In 2010, he was selected as a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow, funding one-year of post-doctoral research at the University of London (SOAS). Szostak’s research investigates the intersection of artistic identity, national heritage, and received cultural tradition, with special attention to the technical and ideological aspects of neotraditional Japanese painting. In 2013, he published a book on Kyoto painter Tsuchida Bakusen (1887-1936), and he has contributed essays to several edited volumes, international exhibition catalogues, and academic journals. His ongoing research includes a translation project entitled “Japanese Modern Art Sources and Documents (1860s-1940s),” and a study of modernist Japanese Buddhist painting.

Paola Zamperini

Paola Zamperini, Associate Professor of literatures and cultures in Chinese, has a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Women and Gender Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Gender and sexuality studies are an integral part not only of Zamperini’s training and research, but also of her pedagogy, and she has consistently divided her teaching at Northwestern between Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her pedagogical mission is to create learning environments imprinted by the methodologies and approaches of feminist and queer theory, whilst preserving and deepening engagement with Chinese and East Asian cultural traditions, past and present. To date, she has written and published extensively (in Italian, English, and Chinese) books and articles about representations of prostitution, female suicide, fashion theory and history, pornography, the influences on Buddhism on early modern and modern Chinese fiction, and spiritual resonance, in Chinese literature and culture and beyond.

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Lisa Battaglia

Dr. Battaglia is a comparative religionist with scholarly interest in Asian religions, and especially contemporary Buddhist movements in Southeast Asia. Her research has focused on women’s ordination in Theravada Buddhism, women’s alternative renunciant communities in Buddhist Thailand, and, most recently, representations of beauty and the female body in Buddhism. Dr. Battaglia’s research interests lie at the intersection of Asian religious traditions and critical methods in the study of religion. She is particularly interested in the contemporary movement for women’s full monastic ordination in Buddhist countries, aptly termed the “bhikkhuni movement.” Her research aims to develop a dialogical model for exploring western feminist critique and indigenous Buddhist subjectivities. A key concern of her scholarship is how gender, sexuality, human rights, and religious vocation translate across cultures and cultural domains. Her fieldwork and research have taken her throughout Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Malaysia. Dr. Battaglia received her B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. from the University of Alabama, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.

Jessey Choo

Jessey Choo (Ph.D., Princeton) is Associate Professor of Chinese History and Religion at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is a historian who specializes in the Chinese Middle Ages (200–1000 CE) and Chinese popular religions. Her research focuses on cultural and religious practices associated with childbearing and death, as well as women’s acquisition and exercise of personal agency in everyday life. Her first book, Inscribing Death: Burials, Representations, and Remembrance in Tang China, 618–907 CE (University of Hawaii Press, 2022) examines the uses and limits of burial and entombed epitaph inscriptions in (re-)fashioning identities and memories. Her next book, titled “The Blood Debts: Childbearing and Women's Salvation in Chinese Religions, 1000–1500," will trace the emergence and popularization of a Buddho-Daoist soteriology centering on childbearing and the Blood Lake Hell. She is also the co-editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji (Hackett Publishing Co., 2017).

Pascale Engelmajer

Pascale F. Engelmajer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of History, Politics and Religious Studies at Carroll University in Wisconsin. She is the author of Women in Pāli Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Path in Mutual Dependence (Routledge) a book that examines women’s spiritual agency, and Buddhism (Hodder and Stoughton) an introduction that provides an understanding of how doctrine informs practice in the contemporary Buddhist world by describing day-to-day practices as the basis for an examination of the history, doctrines, and practices of Buddhism. She has published numerous book chapters and articles on women and Buddhism. Her recent research adopts a matricentric feminist approach based on the work of Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick and Andrea O’Reilly to explore how mothering can be described as a way to embody the Buddhist path in the ancient Pāli Buddhist texts. In that context, she has been working with an informal research network on motherhood/mothering and religion, participating in, and organizing workshops both in North America and Europe.

Sarah Jacoby

Sarah H. Jacoby is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She specializes in Tibetan Buddhist studies, with research interests in Buddhist revelation (gter ma), religious auto/biography, Tibetan literature, gender and sexuality, the history of emotions, and the history of eastern Tibet. She is the author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), co-author of Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-editor of Buddhism Beyond the Monastery: Tantric Practices and their Performers in Tibet and the Himalayas (Brill, 2009). She has recently published articles on motherhood in Tibetan Buddhism, and currently she is working on a full Tibetan-English translation of Sera Khandro’s autobiography, among other projects. At Northwestern, she teaches a range of Buddhist Studies courses for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Keller Kimbrough

Keller Kimbrough is Professor of Japanese and Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a native of Colorado and Tennessee. He earned his BA in English at Colorado College (1990) and his MA and PhD degrees in Japanese Literature from Columbia University and Yale (1994 and 1999). His publications include Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Japan (2008), Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (2013), and Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds: A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales, co-edited with Haruo Shirane (2018).

Reiko Ohnuma

Reiko Ohnuma is the Robert 1932 and Barbara Black Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, where she has taught for over two decades. She is a specialist in the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, with a particular focus on narrative literature preserved in Sanskrit and Pali. Her work has focused on the themes of the body, gender, sexuality, and animality. She holds a B.A. from the University of California (Berkeley) and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She is the author of Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (Columbia University Press, 2007); Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2012); and Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Jin Y. Park

Jin Y. Park is Professor of Buddhist and intercultural philosophy and the Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University. She specializes in East Asian Buddhism (especially Zen and Huayan), Buddhist ethics, intercultural philosophy, and modern East Asian philosophy. Park employs Buddhism to engage with contemporary issues with a special focus on gender, power, violence, and marginality. Her research on modern East Asian philosophy examines the dawn of philosophy in East Asia and the East-West encounter in that context. She is the author, translator or editor of over ten books including Women and Buddhist Philosophy (2017); Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun (trans. 2014); and Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism (ed.2010). Park currently serves as the President-Elect of the American Academy of Religion and the President of the North American Korean Philosophy Association. She also served as the President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (2018-2019), was a board member of the Board of Directors (2013-2015) of the American Academy of Religion, and the Founding Director of the International Society for Buddhist Philosophy (2001-2018).

Melody Rod-ari

Melody Rod-ari received her B.A. and M.A. in art history and museum studies from Boston University, and her Ph.D. in art history from UCLA. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Loyola Marymount University. Melody is also the Southeast Asian Content Editor for Smarthistory as well as an active curator who has organized exhibitions and permanent galleries for the Norton Simon Museum and the USC, Pacific Asia Museum. Her research investigates modern and contemporary Buddhist visual culture in Thailand, and the history of collecting South and Southeast Asian art in American and European museums. Her work has been published by various journals and university presses and include topics such as “Who Owns Ban Chiang?: The Discovery, Collection and Repatriation of Ban Chiang Artefacts” (NUS Press, 2019) and “The Origins of the Emerald Buddha” (DK Printworld, 2020).

Vanessa R. Sasson

Vanessa R. Sasson is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts Department of Marianopolis College where she has been teaching since 1999. She is also a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State and Research Member at CERIAS at UQAM. She has published widely as a scholar in her field. Her most recent edited volume is titled, Jewels, Jewelry, and Other Shiny Things in the Buddhist Imaginary (Hawaii University Press, 2021). Yasodhara and the Buddha (Bloomsbury, 2021) is her first academic novel; it is followed by The Gathering (Equinox 2023), which focuses on the women’s request for ordination. She has a forthcoming edited volume with Kristin Scheible, entitled The Buddha: A Storied Life (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Jessica Starling

Jessica Starling received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and subsequently served as the Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Religious Studies department of Lewis & Clark College in 2013. Her research focuses on the intersection of Buddhist doctrine, gender, family, ethics, emotion, and material practices in Japan. Starling’s first monograph, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in the Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), was an ethnographic account of temple wives in the True Pure Land Buddhist School (Jōdo Shinshū). Her work has appeared in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Global Buddhism, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She has received numerous fellowships in support of her research, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Japan Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. She currently serves as co-chair of the Japanese Religions Unit Steering Committee for the American Academy of Religion, and co-editor of the Buddhism section of Religion Compass.

John Szostak

John Szostak’s primary research focus is modern Japanese art history. He did his PhD research as a Fulbright fellow at Kyoto University, studying early 20th century Kyoto-based Nihonga (neotraditional) painters and their professional networks. His research has been funded by the Japan Studies Endowment (UH-Mānoa), the University Research Council (UH-Mānoa), and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies. In 2010, he was selected as a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow, funding one-year of post-doctoral research at the University of London (SOAS). Szostak’s research investigates the intersection of artistic identity, national heritage, and received cultural tradition, with special attention to the technical and ideological aspects of neotraditional Japanese painting. In 2013, he published a book on Kyoto painter Tsuchida Bakusen (1887-1936), and he has contributed essays to several edited volumes, international exhibition catalogues, and academic journals. His ongoing research includes a translation project entitled “Japanese Modern Art Sources and Documents (1860s-1940s),” and a study of modernist Japanese Buddhist painting.

Paola Zamperini

Paola Zamperini, Associate Professor of literatures and cultures in Chinese, has a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Women and Gender Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Gender and sexuality studies are an integral part not only of Zamperini’s training and research, but also of her pedagogy, and she has consistently divided her teaching at Northwestern between Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her pedagogical mission is to create learning environments imprinted by the methodologies and approaches of feminist and queer theory, whilst preserving and deepening engagement with Chinese and East Asian cultural traditions, past and present. To date, she has written and published extensively (in Italian, English, and Chinese) books and articles about representations of prostitution, female suicide, fashion theory and history, pornography, the influences on Buddhism on early modern and modern Chinese fiction, and spiritual resonance, in Chinese literature and culture and beyond.