University of Heidelberg

Speakers

Anna Andreeva (Heidelberg)

Anna Andreeva received her BA from the Irkutsk Linguistic University in Siberia in 1997, where she was trained as translator in Japanese and English. She lived in Japan in 1998-2001, where she accomplished her MA in Japanese classical literature at Kanazawa University. Anna received her MPhil (2002) and PhD (2006) at Cambridge University, where she worked on the issues of esoteric Buddhism and Shinto in medieval Japan, before being awarded a postdoc at Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard for 2006-2007. During 2007-2010, she held the Margaret Smith Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. Currently, Anna is a research fellow and Assistant Professor in Japanese History at the Cluster of Excellence "Europe and Asia", Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. She is coordinating the project "Religion and Medicine in Premodern East Asia" and teaching courses on Japanese Religions. 

Michael Como (Columbia University)

Michael Como, Associate Professor (B.A., Harvard, 1985; Ph.D., Stanford, 2000), is Toshu Fukami Professor of Shinto Studies. His recent research has focused on the religious history of the Japanese islands from the Asuka through the early Heian periods. He is the author of several articles on the ritual and political consequences of the introduction of literacy, sericulture and horse-culture from the Asian sub-continent into ancient Japan. His major publications include Shotoku: Ethnicity, Ritual and Violence in the Formation of Japanese Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2008), Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2009) and Medieval Shinto, a special edition of the Cahiers d’Êxtreme Asie that he co-edited with Bernard Faure and Iyanaga Nobumi. He is currently working on a new monograph tentatively entitled “Resonant Bodies: Disease and Astrology in the Heian Cultic Revolution."

Bernhard Scheid (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien)

Dr. Bernhard Scheid is a senior research fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia. His major field of research is the history of Shinto. After a detailed study of medieval Yoshida Shinto he is now focusing on Hachiman cults but also deals with concepts of Shinto and religion.  

Mark Teeuwen (University of Oslo)

Mark Teeuwen is a Professor of Japanese Studies at University of Oslo. He specializes in Japanese religious practices, and in particular, on the intellectual history of kami cults in pre-modern Japan. His publications include monographs on the intellectual history of the Watarai (1996), annotated translation of Nakatomi Harae Kunge (1998, with Henny van der Veere) and many collaborative projects, such as Shinto in History (1996, with John Breen), a special issue of Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, “Tracing Shinto in the History of Japanese Religions” (2002, with Bernhard Scheid), Buddhas and Kami in Japan (2003, with Fabio Rambelli), The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion (2006, with Bernhard Scheid) and The New History of Shinto (2010, with John Breen).