Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism

Pei-Ying Lin

2015-2017 Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism

Pei-Ying Lin was the Sheng Yen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism, 2015-2017. Her research interests are Chan Buddhism, ordination rituals, Bodhisattva precepts, and Buddhist discourse on cultural identity. She studied at National Taiwan University (BA in Political Science, 2002), Cambridge University (MPhil in Oriental Studies, 2006), and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (PhD in the Study of Religion, 2012). Her thesis brought together a wide range of documents from ninth-century China, Japan and Korea, and cross-culturally examined the...

Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies

Ryan Overbey

2013-2015 Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies

Ryan Overbey studies the intellectual and ritual history of Buddhism, with particular focus on early medieval Buddhist spells and ritual manuals. He studied at Brown University (AB in Classics & Sanskrit and Religious Studies, 2001) and at Harvard University (PhD in the Study of Religion, 2010). He worked as an academic researcher for Prof. Dr. Lothar Ledderose’s project on Stone Sūtras at the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, and also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. His dissertation explored the ideological and...

Jann Ronis

2011-2013 Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies

Jann Ronis studied religion, Tibetan studies, Sinology, and the Tibetan and Chinese languages at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2009 for a dissertation about developments in the monasteries of eastern Tibet, along the border between Tibet and China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His dissertation focused on innovations in scholastics, liturgical practices, and administration spearheaded by the lamas of Katok Monastery and their widespread adoption in the region. The resulting network of monasteries represented the only...

Stefan Baums

2010-2011 Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies

Stefan Baums was a Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and a Group in Buddhist Studies Visiting Professor during the 2011-12 academic year. He studied Indology, Tibetology and Linguistics at the Georg‐August‐Universität Göttingen; Sanskrit, Nepali and Buddhist Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and South Asian and Buddhist Studies at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2009 for his study of a first‐century Gāndhārī birch‐bark manuscript containing a commentary on a selection of early...

Other

Erez Joskovich

2016-2018 Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism

Erez Joskovich was the Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism (2016-18). He specializes in the intellectual and religious history of Chan/Zen Buddhism, with a particular focus on the development of Japanese Zen since the 18th century to the present. His doctoral dissertation is a detailed study of the development of lay Zen in modern Japan. While working on his dissertation he was awarded fellowships from the Japan Foundation and the Japanese Ministry of Education. The fellowships enabled him to work as a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo (2008-12). He received his...

Michaela Mross

2014-2016 Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism

Michaela Mross was the Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism, 2014-16. Her research interests are Zen Buddhism, Buddhist rituals, sacred music, and manuscript and print culture in premodern Japan. She completed her PhD in Japanese Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2014 with a thesis on kōshiki (Buddhist ceremonials) in the Sōtō school after having conducted research at the Komazawa University and the Research Institute for Japanese Music Historiography of the Ueno Gakuen University from 2007-2013. Before coming to Berkeley, she was a research associate (...

Xi He

2014-2016 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow

Xi He was the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, 2014-16. Her research interests include Buddhist narratives; the translation and transmission of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese; and women and gender in Buddhism traditions. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation focused on the early Sanskrit Buddhist text, the Lalitavistara, exploring how Buddhist values and ideals are textualized in Buddhist narratives and the close relationship between Sanskrit...

Jessica Starling

2012-2013 Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism

Jessica Starling was the Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism for 2012-13. She completed her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2012, after conducting research as a visiting scholar at Otani University in Kyoto from 2009-2011. Her dissertation concerned the history and contemporary experiences of temple wives, known as bomori, in the Jodo Shinshu or True Pure Land School of Buddhism in Japan. Her articles include a study of prescriptive accounts of temple wives from the Meiji through the prewar period, and an in-depth study of sermons for temple...

Stefan Larsson

2010-2012 Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow

Stefan Larsson received his Ph.D. in History of Religions from Stockholm University in 2009. His doctoral dissertation is a detailed study of the life stories of the “mad” Tibetan yogin Tsangnyon Heruka (1452-1507). While working on his dissertation he was awarded a fellowship from the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT). The fellowship enabled him to spend a semester as a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia. His research focuses upon the non-monastic and practice-oriented forms of Tibetan Buddhism. Moreover, he is interested...