Buddhist Studies

Xingyi Wang was the 2021-2023 Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow of Chinese Buddhism. Her research includes Buddhist monasticism, Vinaya studies, and Buddhist ethics. Born and raised in China, she received her MTS (2015) from Harvard Divinity School and Ph.D. (2021) from Harvard University. Her dissertation focuses on the commentarial tradition of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya and the formation of the Vinaya School through the cultural exchanges between Song China and Kamakura Japan. During her stay at UC Berkeley, she is expected to explore topics on Buddhist monasticism in the Yuan Dynasty.

Hou Xiaoming 侯笑明 is the 2022-2024 Glorisun Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Chinese Buddhism specializing in cross-cultural transmission and translation. She received her Ph.D. from EPHE/PSL (École Pratique des Hautes Études/Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) in Paris, Department of Religions and Systems of Thought, in the area of History of Religion and Religious Anthropology, in 2022. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Pratiquer le bouddhisme en chinois: traduction et reconstruction des enseignements sur la méditation bouddhique du IIe au VIe siècles en Chine, focuses on the interdependent dynamics between meditation and exegesis in early medieval China. She received her M.A. in Asian Studies from EPHE in 2015, her B.A. in French Literature, and a secondary major in Chinese Literature from Fudan University in 2013. During her stay in Berkeley, she is working on two book projects. The first focuses on reshaping his doctoral dissertation in French into an English book manuscript tentatively entitled Practicing Buddhism in Chinese: Meditative Exegesis and Exegesis for Meditation. The second is a French book manuscript originating from her M.A. dissertation. It explores the transformation in the representation of Buddhism in francophone Europe from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century by studying the French translations of the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters.

Samuel Grimes is Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies. His research centers primarily on Sanskritic Vajrayāna in South Asia and Newar Buddhism in Nepal. He received an MA from the University of Hawai’i, MPhil from Oxford University, and PhD from the University of Virginia. His dissertation examined responses to crises among Buddhists of the Nepal Valley (Kathmandu Valley), and it included ethnographic work in contemporary Newar Buddhism, as well as an examination of the state of Vajrayāna in the Valley in the 13th century and the centuries leading up to that period. He is also interested in kingship in Nepal, practical negotiations between Buddhist and Hindu ritualists, and the social worlds and dynamics exhibited in Sanskritic Vajrayāna texts.

Marta Sanvido is a Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral fellow in Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley. Before moving to Berkeley, Dr. Sanvido worked as an adjunct professor of Japanese Language and Culture at Ca’Foscari University of Venice (a.a. 2019-2020). She earned a Ph.D. in Japanese religions from the same university in 2019. During her doctoral years, she conducted two years of fieldwork in Japanese temples and archives with the generous support of the Ca’Foscari International Bursary and the Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship. Sanvido’s research interests lie in the intersection of different types of knowledge emerging from Zen medieval and early modern secret textual corpus. Her dissertation traced the intellectual history of medieval and early modern Sōtō school. It focused in particular on the development of different Sōtō Zen branches and their connection with the broader context of the Japanese cultural milieu as depicted in secret manuals and accounts exchanged between the 14th to the 18th century. At UC Berkeley, she is working to shape her doctoral thesis into a book manuscript. Her first book project aims at shedding light on the dynamics of secrecy in premodern Japan by exploring a wide variety of sources such as secret texts, literary works, mythological narratives, and historical records. Dr. Sanvido is interested in a broad range of topics that include mountain religiosity, divinatory practices, women and gender, medieval Prince Shо̄toku cult, hagiography, local female deities, mythological discourses, Song-period Neo-Confucianism in Japan, and medieval medicine.