Michaela Mross

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 (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Georg-August-University Goettingen. At UC Berkeley, she worked on a book manuscript about the development of kōshiki in the Sōtō school analyzing ritual changes, the relation of rituals to their institutional context as well as the role of music in Buddhist ceremonials. She also resesearched the transmission and vocalization of one of the most influential Buddhist ceremonials, the Shiza kōshiki composed by the Kegon-Shingon monk Myōe, for a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies on kōshiki. She is now Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University.