Professor and Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair in Japanese Studies
East Asian Languages and Culture
Mark Blum, Professor and Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair in Japanese Studies, received his M.A. in Japanese Literature from UCLA and his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in Pure Land Buddhism throughout East Asia, with a focus on the Japanese medieval period. He also works in the area of Japanese Buddhist reponses to modernism, Buddhist conceptions of death in China and Japan, historical consciousness in Buddhist thought, and the impact of the Nirvana Sutra (Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra) in East Asian Buddhism. He is the author of...
Khyentse Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tibetan Buddhism
Group in Buddhist Studies
South & Southeast Asian Studies
Jacob Dalton works on tantric ritual, Nyingma religious history, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is co-author of Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library (Brill, 2006) and author of The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), Through the Eyes of the Compendium of Intentions: The History of a Tibetan Ritual Tradition(Columbia University Press, 2016), and Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism (Columbia...
Penelope Edwards teaches in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies and works on Burma, Cambodia, Chinese diaspora and is broadly interested in culture, people and literature in translation across time and space.
A historian of the art and architecture of Japan and Buddhist visual cultures, Gregory Levine is at work on a trilogy that examines modern-contemporary Buddhist visual cultures: Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments (2017); Buddha Heads: Fragments and Landscapes; and Other Buddhas: Race, War, and Buddhist Visual Culture. A concurrent project,...
Chair, The Numata Center for Buddhist Studies; Head Graduate Advisor, Group in Buddhist Studies; D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies
East Asian Languages and Cultures
The Numata Center for Buddhist Studies
Professor Robert Sharf received his B.A. (Religious Studies) and M.A. (Chinese Studies) from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Michigan. He taught at McMaster University (1989-95) and the University of Michigan (1995-2003) before joining the Berkeley faculty. He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion. He is author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A...
Program Director, Group in Buddhist Studies; Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Buddhist and South Asian Studies
South and Southeast Asian Studies
Alexander von Rospatt is Professor for Buddhist and South Asian Studies, and Director of the Group in Buddhist Studies. He specializes in the doctrinal history of Indian Buddhism, and in Newar Buddhism, the only Indic Mahayana tradition that continues to persist in its original South Asian setting (in the Kathmandu Valley) right to the present. His first book sets forth the development and early history of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness. His new book “The Svayambhu Caitya and its Renovations” deals with the historical renovations of the Svayambhū Stupa of Kathmandu. Based on Newar...