DNA evidence of Tang dynasty cats www.livescience.com/animals/dome...

Today's #ManuscriptMonday shows "tendoku," a way of "reading" a Buddhist sutra by rapidly fanning it out and then letting it cascade while chanting the title or a small section. In this case, the priest touches the book to the body as a ritual empowerment for protection. youtu.be/CsN-9xc9hlY?...

Over the weekend, @jjrs-nirc.bsky.social hosted a book talk on "The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions" (2025) with editor Matthew D. McMullen & OG Nanzan Guide editor Paul Swanson. The event was held in Japanese. The recording is now available on the NIRC YouTube channel! youtu.be/Q0r7ZgensPo

A great blog project on the topic of urban to rural migration and rural revitalisation ran by Cornelia Reiher at the Freie Universität Berlin: userblogs.fu-berlin.de/urban-rural-... Including a recent gust contribution by Julia Olsson on her fieldwork on Akiya in Kochi Prefecture. Check it out.

The Tokyo District Court strips the Unification Church (or Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) of its religious corporation status. A new financial reality for the group and a germane development for the religious freedom legal landscape in Japan. www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20...

Our next Fear Research Network (FeRN) seminar will be on April 2, 2025. Valentina Zagaria will present on “The harga is the women’s fault” – Fearing migration’s revolutionary potential in a Tunisian border town" events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:.... @uomsalc.bsky.social @uomsoss.bsky.social

@uomsalc.bsky.social will be holding an online information session for potential applicants to the following schemes: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships. Link here: shorturl.at/opLFB

Looking forward to visiting University of Toronto & McMaster University in a couple of weeks. I appreciate the opportunity to share my work through the Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies 2024-2025. My first time in Toronto & Hamilton. I’ve been assured Spring is the time to visit. 🌱

Call for 12 Bicentenary Postdoc Research Fellowships (3-years) at UoM. Fellows will need a mentor and address the Faculty of Humanities priority research themes of Digital Futures; Sustainable Futures; Creativity; Global Inequalities; and Adaptive Societies. www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Sheffield is an important centre of expertise on East Asia, both within the UK and internatiinally! Please share and sign to support our colleagues!

Looking forward to the Food System Temporalities conference with a great programme of papers: from the Red Palm Weevil infestations, to fishy futures, slow food movements & technological interventions in contemporary foodscapes. Excited to throw my two “Buddhist food waste” cents into the mix.

My copy of The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions arrived yesterday. Many congratulations to the editors, @mcmullen.bsky.social and @jolyonbt.bsky.social, and the stellar collective of the contributors. @kaitlynugoretz.bsky.social The cover photo is truly fab! Feels like a good start to 2025!

Harvard-Yenching Library Travel Grant programme has reopened: 10 grants of $2000 each in 2025 & 🤞🏼 more to follow. Aimed at non-tenured faculty members, dissertation-writing PhDs/ABDs & independent scholars. Award period by 30 June 2025 Deadline: 31 January 2025 library.harvard.edu/grants-fello...

My department has just advertised 5 salaried PhD positions. Projects within the fields of religion, culture studies, environmental humanities, and/or Asian/Middle Eastern studies are welcome. 3-4 years, full-time, fully funded. Candidates must have finished their MA. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

The Fear Research Network (FeRN), led by @chikaw.bsky.social and yours truly, brings together researchers interested in the politics, feelings, and practices that converge around fear from historical and contemporary perspectives. tinyurl.com/ycx25kkb Here are some of our upcoming events at UoM

Fascinating online (and physical) exhibit on "how women and their families experienced pregnancy and childbirth in early modern Japan," with many amazing images like this one, a parodic rendering of the Buddhist Ten Realms Mandala placed within the womb. www.nichibun.ac.jp/online/ucsf_...

Landed safely in Venezia for ‘Buddhist Foodways: Vegetarianism, Ritual Economies and Gastropolitics’ Workshop hosted by NICHE at Ca' Foscari University. Here’s to the next couple of days of great conversations. www.unive.it/data/33113/2...

Nothing better than Venice in late November for the “Buddhist Foodways: Vegetarianism, Ritual Economies and Geopolitics” workshop hosted by the New Institute: Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at the Ca' Foscari University.

For anyone curious about the history of emotions and allied fields, here are some starter resources, accessible for students and professionals alike. 1. The public lecture series organised by NACHE/SIHEX in English and Spanish and freely available here: mars.gmu.edu/collections/...

If you work on or teach about religious minorities have a look at the Religious Minorities Online Project www.degruyter.com/database/RMO... a peer-reviewed, open-access project co-edited by Michael Stausberg, Alex van der Haven and yours truly. We have published 23 articles so far.

Lots of new followers in the last several days, so between that and the rollout of the new threading feature, this seems as good a time as any to plug a new book that I co-edited with @mcmullen.bsky.social. It’s the New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-ne...

Outstanding job opening in a legendary Buddhist Studies Department with an absolutely top-notch Japan Studies program as well. Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA is searching for a tenure stream assistant professor in Japanese Buddhism! recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF09824?fbc...

Trying out this thing, I guess, although I am very shy on social media. I had an article about how female Shinto priests negotiate menstrual pollution come out recently, if you want to see the sort of things I work on! nccisjpnew.wixsite.com/nccisjp/%E8%...

It's spooky month, so OUP made the first chapter of my #Buddhism book, Of Ancestors and Ghosts, free to read for the month of October. This chapter traces the origin of the #hungryghost and, with it, Buddhist cosmology. Link here: academic.oup.com/book/58038/chapter/477477607

The Manchester China Institute put together an outstanding recording of my public talk from 15th October, now on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2CO...

The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus just published a short special issue on "Behind the Scenes of Media and Legal Responses to the Abe Assassination" edited by Tomomi Yamaguchi and me. apjjf.org/behind-the-s...

Biographies of Excess starting tomorrow! Excited for the next 2 days of discussions on divestment & sorting of sacred objects, biographical intimacy, estate sales, practices & ethics of narrating lives, graves that misbehave & things that overflow.

A great place to pursue a PhD on religion in Japan, and work with the best. I might be biased but certainly not wrong 😁 One full PhD scholarship (fees & maintenance for 3.5 years) @OfficialUoM Deadline: January 13, 2025 for October 2025 entry www.manchester.ac.uk/study/postgr...

The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Edited by @mcmullen.bsky.social and @jolyonbt.bsky.social . Published with the University of Hawai'i Press. Cover design by @kaitlynugoretz.bsky.social Available in December 2025 just in time for Christmas. At 552 pages, its the perfect stocking-stuffer.

My chapter **Gendering Religious Labor and Buddhist Temple Economies in Contemporary Japan** in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion, Gender and Sexuality (2024) edited by Sonya Sharma, @DawnLlewellyn & Sîan Melvill Hawthorne is now out out: 1/5 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbur...

‘Cloned Buddhas’ are upon us: my new Open Access article on how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. My case is the Shaka Triad (釈迦三尊像) at Hōryūji and its cloned replicas. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Already excited about an upcoming workshop ‘Biographies of Excess’ at the University of Copenhagen organised by yours truly & @trineb.bsky.social ccrs.ku.dk/research/cen... Fantastic line up with James Bielo, Hannah Gould, Halle O’Neal, Charisma K. Lepcha, Verena Meyer, and Andreas Bandak.

A compelling read on heritage lost at sea. theconversation.com/underwater-c...

Guess who is also catching a ride to our PhD course this morning… ‘Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality’ here we go!!! 🦆 @trineb.bsky.social

Starting tomorrow… our PhD Course ‘WASTE: CULTURAL IMAGINARIES AND MATERIALITY’. We will kick off Day 1 with sessions on theorising waste, waste epistemologies, and visualising waste. environmentalhumanities.ku.dk/events/waste... @trineb.bsky.social And Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has agreed to return the 14th c. remains of the Buddhist monks to South Korea, along with the silver-gilt Lamaistic pagoda-shaped reliquary (the latter, technically as a loan). The remains are considered Buddhist relics or śarīra. m-en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN2024...

It gives us enormous pleasure to announce that, after more than 3 years of planning and preparation, Japan Past & Present is now up and running! 🎉🗾 JPP is a global information hub & repository that promotes research & teaching in the Japanese humanities! japanpastandpresent.org/en/news/anno...

For anyone who missed it, a video of the conversation between Morgan Pitelka and Ethan Segal on Professor Pitelka's book "Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan" is now available on the MJHA YouTube channel! youtu.be/FfbcbtAGiyA

☸️📣Looking for researchers interested in Buddhism & past and present heritage-making. Aiming to gather stories of heritage on the periphery & explore questions of definition, recognition, and preservation of material & immaterial formations that exist on the fringe of mainstream narratives. #AAR2024

FeRN - the Fear Research Network now have a website www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/modern-langu...

In collaboration with the amazing FuturEverything team we are looking for an artist to work with us on the "Fear and Belonging in Minority Buddhist Communities" (alc.manchester.ac.uk/.../fear-and...) Please distribute widely! futureeverything.org/news/artist-...

My project's, REFUSE, website in EN/JPN finally went live in December. The project's focus is on what I term 'Buddhist excess', as well as the labour and decisions involved in caring for this excess, emotionally, ritually & practically. Here's the link for anyone curious ccrs.ku.dk/research/cen...

3 PhD positions at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen Fully salaried. Deadline 11 February 2024 jobportal.ku.dk/phd/?show=16...

We welcome PhD applications for September 2024 entry. The application deadline to be considered for funding competitions is 12 January 2024. For available scholarships see: www.manchester.ac.uk/study/postgr....

Permanent position in Social Anthropology at UoManchester - Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DEM146/l...

Monumental news from Japan. Ikeda Daisaku, Honorary President of Soka Gakkai and President of Soka Gakkai International, has died. My sincerest condolences go to my adherent friends, for whom the death of Ikeda is the loss of a cherished loved one.

In this video, Ikeda's son Hiromasa and current president Harada Minoru speak of Ikeda's death on November 15th and the funeral held for the family on the 17th. Ikeda was cremated on November 18th. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeuE...

A geat conversation coming up tomorrow (Friday, 17 November) at the University of Copenhagen! @trineb.bsky.social Fabio Gygi, Gayatri Rathore & I will be discussing the practices & imaginaries of waste across diverse contexts in India and Japan. Join us at 1 PM! asiandynamics.ku.dk/english/cale...

If you’re interested in matters of #waste and #excess and you’re anywhere near Copenhagen 🇩🇰 on Friday 17 November, join us at 1 pm for a public panel: **Waste temporalities and practices in #India and #Japan** With Gayatri Rathore, Trine Brox, Fabio Gygi & yours truly. ccrs.ku.dk/research/cen...

One studentship available at The University of Manchester for a PhD project on religion in Japan (3.5 year, fees and stipend). Please circulate. www.manchester.ac.uk/study/postgr...