All full-time students in 2026-2027, with an overall grade point average of at least 2.00, are eligible to apply for these funds using the form online.

The deadline for applications is Monday, March 16, 2026.

The department has a generous pool of funds available to be awarded against next year’s tuition and expenses. Professor Pamela D. Winfield can answer any questions about the process or the application.

The conference was co-sponsored by the Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies (Peking University), The Frogbear ‘Buddhism from the Ground Up’ Project (University of British Columbia), Centre d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires sur le Bouddhisme (CEIB) and Institut National de Langues et Cultures Orientales (INALCO), Paris.

Her paper, “Vajrapani in Renaissance Italy? Buddhist Iconography and the Question of Premodern Orientalism” examined the historical conditions under which classical Hercules imagery developed into the Buddhist dharma protector Vajrapani, who was then reintroduced back into the European cultural sphere in the 16th century.

As part of her semester-long appointment, she is ŸĂŸĂÈÈ a graduate level seminar on Zen and visual/material culture and pursuing research for her next book. On Friday, Oct. 25, Winfield also delivered the keynote address for the annual Premodern Japanese Religions Conference at McGill University.

Her talk, “Materiality as Method: How to Do Things with Zen” launched the conference, where scholars from Harvard, McGill, University of Edinburgh, SUNY Albany and High Point University shared their latest research at the intersection of Buddhist studies and visual/material culture.

The deadline for applications is Sunday, March 3, 2024.

The department has a very generous pool of funds available to be awarded against 2024-25 tuition and expenses. Professor Pamela Winfield would be happy to answer any questions about the process or the application—feel free to be in touch by email at pwinfield@elon.edu at any point before the deadline. Please also help spread the word and encourage others to apply.

“Material Theories in Japanese Buddhism: What KĆ«kai and Dƍgen Thought About Things” appears in the first section of the volume dedicated to the world’s diverse “Genealogies of Material Religion.” Her chapter explains how two great Japanese Buddhist masters described their philosophies of form. As opposed to Greek and Christian neo-platonic cosmology that posits a vertically oriented emanation of forms from an ineffable source, these two Buddhist masters describe a radically immanent and horizontally-oriented dependent arising of forms that manifest in and as emptiness. KĆ«kai describes form and emptiness ontologically as mutually reflexive terms, but Dƍgen sees them epistemologically as the experience of form, then emptiness, then form again (albeit in a transformed light). Her analysis in this volume thus contributes to our understanding of materiality both across and within religious traditions.

The deadline for applications is Monday, March 20, at 9 a.m.

A very generous pool of funds are available to be awarded against 2023-24 tuition and expenses. Professor Pamela Winfield would be happy to answer any questions about the process or the application—feel free to be in touch by email (pwinfield@elon.edu) at any point before the deadline.

It first critically examines the ideological divide between sacred and secular that reduced powerful Buddhist icons into aesthetic objects within 19th century Euro-American collections of Asian “art.”

However, it then also examines how Japanese Buddhist temples in particular persevered through periods of persecution, preservation, and paradox, as they ultimately installed temple “treasure halls” (hƍmotsukan) that replicated the very kinds of western-style museums that had pillaged their temple treasures a century and a half previously. If the 19th century transferred the temple out to the museum, then the 20th century transferred the museum back into the temple grounds.

She concludes that both American and Japanese museums need to be understood as hybrid spaces, where the supposed boundaries between sacred and secular are porous and continually negotiated by diverse audiences.

The two-day virtual event was hosted by the University of Edinburgh on Zoom and Gather and drew into attendance over 100 European and American scholars of Buddhist Studies, Art History, and other cognate fields. The theme of this year’s conference was “Word, Image, Object, Performance.”

Winfield’s keynote speech focused on the role of language as it relates to real-world forms in Buddhism. It was entitled “What’s In A Nāma? A RĆ«pa Would Smell As Sweet: Reflections on Sensational Buddhism.” Her title alluded to the classical Sanskrit terms for “name and form” (nāma rĆ«pa) and put a Buddhist spin on Shakespeare’s famous line about the arbitrariness of language and the primacy of the visual/material/physical object itself that can be grasped by sensory perception. Her phrase, ”Sensational Buddhism,” alluded to Sally Promey’s important edited volume on Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures and Material Practice (Yale University Press, 2014).

The first section of Winfield’s talk reviewed Buddhist theories of sensory perception. It acknowledged that early classical Indian Buddhism and “Mind Only” Buddhism privileged the realms of formless meditation, but then argued that the very metaphors used to envision such states (e.g. atop mountaintops, or below the flowering mind) were themselves in-formed by forms.

The second section of her talk focused on later Mahāyāna Buddhist theories of the imagination and representation that located enlightenment squarely in the material realm. This section concluded that the feedback loop of religion is a process of “making it up” and “making it real,” as forms continually create and reinforce abstract notions and texts about ultimate reality.

The third section of Winfield’s talk took up the abstract concept of emptiness, the definition of enlightenment itself. In Sanskrit, the term ƛunya-tā (lit. “zero”-ness) drew upon the image of a newly engineered number line, and in Chinese and Japanese, the character kĆ« (lit. open, sky) included ideographic elements for both “hole” as well as “construction.”  As a result, even the most abstract and enigmatic ideas about awakening are rooted in the forms of the real world, for as the Heart SĆ«tra says “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

Winfield’s closing remarks encouraged her fellow conference participants to therefore “teach sensationally,” that is, to engage all the senses of the students when ŸĂŸĂÈÈ even highly abstract ideas about invisible religious ideals. Sensory stimulation draws in and demands an emotional response, from curiosity or even bewilderment before the unfamiliar, to the excitement and eagerness to study further. Sparking this powerful affective dimension is the hallmark of the sensational professor.

Winfield’s critical-theoretical article argues that the traditional deity-directed  definition of prayer both does, and does not, apply to Zen. That is, speaking purely from a doctrinal standpoint, Zen technically eschews all higher powers and relies solely on the self-power of seated meditation (zazen) in order to become enlightened. At the same time, however, speaking from a purely pragmatic and institutional standpoint, Zen priests are also trained to perform commissioned prayers (kito) for collective wellbeing as a means to generate income for temples. This practical side of Zen complements the romantic vision of Zen as a purely contemplative tradition.

In the second half of the article, Winfield also considers Carl Olsen’s broader description of prayer as any ritual act that uses “a network of symbols related to sense experiences, moods, emotions, and values” to reinforce one’s identity and membership in a community (Religious Studies: The Key Terms, Routledge 2010, 188-190). She considers whether zazen might fit this expanded definition of prayer, but then also critiques that overgeneralized definition itself. She argues that attempting to universalize the western European category of “prayer” and then subsuming zazen underneath would be reductionistic and politically incorrect, as it does a certain colonizing violence to the Zen tradition on its own terms.

In late February 2020, right before the pandemic-related lockdown, Winfield delivered a paper in French at the Song Dynasty Chan conference at the College de France in Paris, where she obtained positive feedback from European and Japanese scholars from Komazawa University, a co-sponsor of the event. Then in late January 2021, Winfield delivered a related paper in English at the New Directions in Zen Studiesinternational Zoom conference hosted by Stanford University. This conference featured leading scholars mostly from R1 institutions (Stanford, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Duke, Florida International University, Elon), and it was attended by other leading scholars from Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Slovakia, and all over the US.

Her two papers demonstrated how Dogen invokes and manipulates Chinese material theory (essentially the physics of his day) to justify and obtain the material and human resources he needed for two temple building campaigns in 1233 and 1244.