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 her 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.
