Symposium Participants

Stephanie Balkwill is Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism at UCLA. She is interested in the public, religious, and literary lives of women who lived in China between the 4th and 6th centuries. Her forthcoming book (UC Press) is entitled, The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the 6th Century.

Jason BeDuhn is Professor of the Comparative Study of Religions and Asian Studies at Northern Arizona University.  A former Guggenheim Fellow and National Humanities Center Fellow, and an advisor to UNESCO’s Atlas of the Silk Road project, BeDuhn specializes in Manichaeism and other religious cultures of late ancient West and Central Asia, and is a member of a team editing and translating the Coptic Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex.

Huaiyu Chen is Professor of Buddhism and Chinese Religions at Arizona State University. He has many publications on Chinese Buddhism, Religions on the Silk Road, animals in Chinese religions, and the history of modern Chinese humanities. His recent publications include In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (2023) and Animals and Plants in Chinese Religions and Science (2023). He has held fellowships from Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2011-2012), Clare Hall of Cambridge University (2014-2015), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2018).   

Amanda Goodman is Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism at the University of Toronto specializing in the local reception of tantric Buddhism as recorded in the Dunhuang manuscripts. She is currently completing two companion volumes, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang and The Vajra Peak Scripture: A Chinese Buddhist Book of Esoteric Empowerment Rites, that together explore the ritual ecology and codicological terrain of China and Central Asia
during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. Her research interests include Buddhist visual and material culture, Buddhist commentary practices, and the ‘practical canons’ of regional Buddhist
communities.

Matthew King is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where he also directs Asian Studies. His work explores the 18-20th century history of Buddhist philosophical, medical, and political traditions in Inner Asia, often as these confronted new social and intellectual movements like revolutionary modernism, Orientalism, and natural philosophy. His most recent book is In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasianist Journey of Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Columbia University Press, 2022).

Diego Loukota specializes on the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road during the first millennium CE, in what spans cultural areas of South, Central, and East Asia. A philologist by training, he works with texts in the main scriptural languages of Buddhism (Sanskrit, Pāli, Chinese, Tibetan), as well as the rarer Gāndhārī and Khotanese. His research features philological treatment of unpublished and undeciphered manuscript fragments from Central Asia. and his recent publications focus on how the Iranian, Sinitic, and Indic traditions played a role in the development of Buddhism in the oasis kingdom of Khotan. He acts as sectional chair for Central Asia at the AOS.

David Lurie is Wm. Theodore and Fanny Brett de Bary and Class of 1941 Collegiate Professor of Asian Humanities and Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature at Columbia University. In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy his research interests include: the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; the history of linguistic thought; Japanese mythology; and world philology. He is the author of Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, which received the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012. He is completing a new scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled The Emperor’s Dreams: Reading Japanese Mythology.

Narges Nematollahi is the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Assistant Professor of Persian Language at the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She holds a dual PhD in Iranian Studies and Linguistics from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research is focused on the stylistics of state letters in the Ancient and Late Antique Near East in Aramaic, Greek and Middle Persian, and how the epistolary heritage of pre-Islamic Near East influenced the emerging epistolary tradition in Arabic in the early Islamic Empire. Her broader areas of research are historical sociolinguistics and formal semantics. 

Eric Schluessel is associate professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University. He is the author of several books and articles on the social history of China and Central Asia, including Land of Strangers, which won the 2021 Fairbank Prize for East Asian History, and a translation of the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi, the essential Uyghur chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang. Schluessel’s work has been supported by fellowships from the NEH and the Institute for Advanced Study. He received his PhD from Harvard in 2016.

Sixiang Wang is an Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is a historian of Chosŏn Korea and early modern East Asia. His research interests also include comparative perspectives on early modern empires, the history of science and knowledge, and issues of language and writing in Korea’s cultural and political history. He teaches courses in Korea’s pre-nineteenth-century history as well as the history of cultural and intellectual interactions in early modern East Asia. His book, Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China reconstructs the cultural strategies of Korean diplomacy with Ming empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It underscores how Korean ritual and literary practices inserted Chosŏn into the Ming empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Sixiang Wang received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. 

Luke Yarbrough is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His research interests include Islamic law, inter-religious relations, hadith studies, Arabic historiography, premodern state administration, and manuscript studies. His book, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Islamic Thought  (Cambridge University Press, 2019) documents and attempts to explain what premodern Muslims wrote about the many influential non-Muslims who helped run their governments.