CMES Affliated Faculty Profile

Geography

Sanjyot Mehendale, Visiting Lecturer

Address: 294 Barrows 1940
Email: sanjyotm@berkeley.edu
Website: http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/visiting_scholars.html

Sanjyot Mehendale received her B.A.(Art and Archaeology) from the University of Amsterdam and her M.A. (Art and Archaeology) from the Rijksuniversity of Leiden, The Netherlands. She obtained her Ph.D. (Near Eastern Studies) in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1997, she has been teaching on Central Asia and Silk Road art and archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. In Fall 2007, she taught "Buddhism along the Silk Road" under the auspices of the Group in Buddhist Studies. From 2001-2005, she was the co-director of the Uzbek-Berkeley Archaeological Mission (UBAM); she is currently developing a new joint archaeological project in Sri Lanka. During the same period, she was Executive Director of the Caucasus and Central Asia Program under the auspices of the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. Among Dr. Mehendale's main research concerns is a focus on the Kushan period, in particular on trade and cultural exchange and the relationship between Kushan kingship and Buddhist institutions. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she has developed, in collaboration with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, a digital archive of the Begram ivory and bone carvings, which were once housed in the National Museum in Kabul, Afghanistan (www.ecai.org/begramweb). The author of several articles on Silk Road art and archaeology, she is the co-editor of Central Asia and the Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora (Routledge, 2005), and is currently working on a book on the Begram carvings. Under the auspices of the Center for Buddhist Studies, Sanjyot Mehendale serves as the program coordinator for its Silk Road Initiative. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Past Visitors Benjamin Bogin (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2005-07) Benjamin Bogin is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Berkeley for the 2005-2007 academic years. He received his B.A. (Intercultural Studies) from Simon's Rock College of Bard and his M.A. and Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Michigan. His primary interests are Tibetan Buddhist literature and history and his doctoral dissertation consists of a critical edition, translation, and study of the autobiography of the seventeenth-century Tibetan lama, Yolmo Tenzin Norbu. He is presently engaged in research on the artistic, literary, and ritual traditions surrounding the Tibetan Buddhist pure land known as the Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain. Bryan Cuevas (Freeman Visiting Professor, 2005-06) Bryan J. Cuevas (M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia) is on leave for the 2005-06 academic year from Florida State University, where he is Assistant Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies. Professor Cuevas is author of The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford, 2003) and is currently completing a book entitled Travels in the Netherworld: Popular Buddhist Accounts of Death and Afterlife in Tibet, as well as two co-edited volumes, The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (Kuroda Institute/University of Hawaii) and Power, Politics, and the Reinvention of Tradition in Tibet, 1600-1800 (Brill). He is co-director of the Tibetan History Collection of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (www.thdl.org) and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion. His current research interests include Tibetan history and historiography, Buddhist popular religion, and monastic politics in premodern Tibet. T. Griffith Foulk (Freeman Visiting Professor 2004/05) T. Griffith Foulk (M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan) was a Freeman Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley during the 2004-05 academic year. He teaches Sarah Lawrence College, where he is Professor of Religion and recently served as Chair of the Humanities Division. In his youth he trained for several years in Zen monasteries in Japan, where he still maintains close ties. He has authored a number of monographs on textual, ritual, and institutional aspects of the history of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhism, and is currently working on two books entitled Zen: A Lexical History and Zen Buddhism in Contemporary Japan. Professor Foulk is Co-editor-in-chief of the Soto Zen Text Project, a major translation project sponsored by the Administrative Headquarters of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokyo. He is also on the editorial board of the Kuroda Institute and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion. Phyllis Granoff (Center for Buddhist Studies Visiting Scholar, Spring 2007) Phyllis Granoff received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Fine Arts. She is currently teaching at Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies and serving as the Chair of the South Asian Studies Council. Her research interests include the development of classical Hinduism, medieval Jainism, and early Mahayana approaches to image worship. Paul Hackett (Center for Buddhist Studies Visiting Scholar, 2005-06) Paul G. Hackett (M.A., University of Virginia; M.L.S., University of Maryland - College Park; M.Phil., Columbia University) is on leave for the 2005-06 academic year from Columbia University, where he is completing his dissertation. Professor Hackett is author of A Tibetan Verb Lexicon: Verbs, Classes, and Syntactic Frames (Snow Lion, 2003) and is currently completing a biography of Theos Bernard. His current research interests include the formation of twentieth century American mythologies of Tibet, and late Indian Buddhist tantra. Michael Hahn (Numata Visiting Professor, Spring 2005) Michael Hahn was the Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley during the spring 2005. A professor of Indology and Tibetology at Philipps-University in Marburg (Germany), his research interests focus on classical Sanskrit and Buddhist literature, in particular narrative works and didactic and epistolary texts. He is the author of numerous articles and books, among them a primer of the Tibetan language that been reprinted seven times and is now forthcoming in an English translation. Christian Luczanits (Freeman Visiting Professor 2004/05) Christian Luczanits was a Freeman Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2004/05. He received his M.A. (1994) and Ph.D (1998) at the Institute of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, the latter degree under the supervision of the late Maurizio Taddei (Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli). His research focuses on art historical topics and is largely based on extensive field research and documentation done in the western Himalayas for more than a decade in the course of different research projects based in Vienna. He has published a number of articles on the early Buddhist monuments, artifacts and inscriptions found in this region. Recently his first book, Buddhist Sculpture in Clay: Early Western Himalayan Art, late 10th to early 13th centuries, has come out with Serindia at Chicago. [home page] [research website] Koichi Shinohara (Numata Visiting Professor, Spring 2007) Koichi Shinohara (Bachelor of Letters and Master of Letters, The University of Tokyo, Ph.D, Columbia University) is senior lecturer of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he works primarily on Buddhism in East Asia. Before coming to Yale in 2004 he taught at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. For the past several years his work has centered around the writings of an influential commentator on monastic practices and historian Daoxuan (596-677) and his collaborator Daoshi (d.u.) at the Ximingsi monastery in the capital city. In recent articles he has written on Daoxuan's discussion of the monastic robe, monk's begging bowl, image worship, and the instruction at the moment of death. He has also examined in some detail the evolution of the cult of Buddha images attributed to King Asoka and worked on Tiantai Buddhist biographies, exploring the religious and political circumstances surrounding the composition of the biography of the founding figure of the school Zhiyi (539-98) and the way lineages of abbots at local monasteries were transformed into a Buddhist universal history by 12th century Tiantai Buddhist historians. Among his current projects is the study of the cult of a deity with a terrifying appearance, Shensha or Jinja ("Deep Sand"). This cult originated in China in connection with the story of a famous pilgrim to India and later became popular in Japan, where a temple bearing the name of the deity continues to flourish outside of Tokyo. Peter Skilling (Numata Visiting Professor, Fall 2005) Peter Skilling is a Fellow of the Lumbini International Research Institute (Lumbini, Nepal) and a Special Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand). He is founder of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation (Bangkok), a project dedicated to the preservation, study and publication of the Buddhist literature of Southeast Asia. He is a founding member of the International Centre for Buddhist Studies (Bangkok). Peter Skilling has lived in Thailand for over thirty years, and has travelled extensively in Asia. His interests include the early history of religion in Southeast Asia as known through inscriptions and archaeological remains; the history of Indian Buddhism and the development of Mahayana sutras; and the Pali and vernacular literature of pre-modern Siam, including jataka and sermon genres. He has also written about the history of the Buddhist order of nuns in India and Siam and the development of the Tibetan canonical collections (Kanjur). His publications include Mahasutras, a critical edition and study of ten Sarvastivadin texts preserved in Tibetan translation in the Kanjur compared with their Pali counterparts (Vols. I and II, Oxford: The Pali Text Society, 1994, 1997; Vol. III, translations, forthcoming). Skilling is reported to be overly fond of durian. He lives in Nandapuri on the outskirts of Bangkok with a turtle rescued from the streets after a flood some years ago.