What does it mean to experience a sacred text? How did Buddhism make its way from south Asia to the Japanese archipelago? How did the adoption of Buddhism impact the Japanese Middle Ages? Join us for a conversation with Charlotte Eubanks, where they discuss some of the many ways in which Buddhist beliefs and practices shaped medieval Japanese history, individuals, and landscapes. Additionally, they shed light on how engagement with Buddhist sacred texts was a deeply embodied experience for Buddhist monks and devotees.
Jonathan F. Correa Reyes is an Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University. His research focuses on constructions of collective identity in the medieval literary archive. He is especially interested in premodern articulations of race and understandings of the Human. Although mainly working on the medieval literary traditions of the British Isles, Jonathan also studies the textual cultures of medieval Iberia and Scandinavia. His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation.
Charlotte Eubanks is Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies at Penn State. They study the material culture of books and word/image relations, with a focus on Japanese literature from the medieval period to the present. They have written on the relation between human body and sacred text in the Buddhist literary tradition in Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), and on intersections of art and politics in the microhistory The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019). They are currently working on several pieces related to medieval Buddhist conceptions of sound.
Reed O'Mara is a PhD candidate and Mellon Fellow in the Department of Art History & Art at Case Western Reserve University. Her primary research interests lie in Jewish illuminated manuscripts, Gothic architectural sculpture, and Indian miniature painting. Reed served as Chair of the Graduate Student Committee of the MAA 2022-23 and was the Mentorship and Professionalization Coordinator for the Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies Board of Directors 2021-23. She is one of the founding producers of TheMulticultural Middle Ages.