I received my Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2014 (with distinction) and M.A. in Buddhist Philosophy from Korea University in 2007. I taught at DePauw University from 2014 to 2024 and joined Johns Hopkins in 2024.
My research focuses on the transnational interactions of Buddhist practices in East Asia by engaging a variety of networks that connect people, places, and praxis in the Buddhist world. Studying such networks has required me to develop an interdisciplinary approach that aims to bring religious studies into conversation with anthropological scholarship on ritual, myth, materiality, and sensory experience. Within this interdisciplinary approach, my method takes specificity as an avenue to new conceptual elaborations. Thus, I zoom in on a discrete deity, a sacred site, a sensorium, or a particular material manifestation of belief to understand how these transnational boundary crossings find and forge new and renewed sociocultural meanings.
My first monograph, Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019) is not only the first monograph in any language on the Tendai Jimon school in Japanese Buddhism, but also the first book-length study in English to examine Korean connections in medieval Japanese religion. By shifting the paradigm from a land-centered vision to a sea-centered one, the work underlines the importance of a transcultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of Buddhist deities.
My second book project, entitled Korean Magical Medicine: Buddhist Healing Talismans in Choson Korea, investigates the religious, historical, and iconographic dimensions of healing talismans produced in Buddhist settings during the Choson period. Although its primary focus is Korean talismans, the book also locates itself in the broader East Asian context, aiming to show the complex web of talismanic culture in East Asia. This project was supported by an ACLS/Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Fellowship (AY 2021–2022). The manuscript is under advance contract with the University of Hwai‘i Press.
I am currently developing a third book project, From Scent to Stench: Smellscapes of Buddhist Temple Kitchens. Recognizing the olfactory sense as one of the key agents that shape everyday experiences and religious beliefs, From Scent to Stench foregrounds a space that has not been explored before—the temple kitchen. The temple kitchen is a realm where ritual offerings, nourishment for monastics, and medical concoctions converge, each corner being replete with a wide array of smells: incense for the kitchen god, smells of cooking, the scents of brewing tea and drying herbs, and even foul garbage. Conceptually, building upon but moving beyond the network model, the book takes a meshwork approach to describe the heterogeneity of smellscapes and their entangled olfactory trails.
