My area of research focuses on East Asian Buddhism and Japanese Religions. My current research interests include Buddhist miracle tale literature, religion and entertainment, and travel culture. I am currently working on a genre of early modern Japanese guidebooks to famous urban places which reveal how motivations for "religious" activities such as pilgrimage were as much rooted in recreational, material pursuits as they were in the worship of the divine.

My doctoral work re-examines one of Japan's perennial deities, Fudo Myoo, by investigating the undervalued roles that local geography, commercialism, and material culture played in the development of religious identities in early modern (seventeenth to mid-nineteenth) Japan. My study, funded by fellowships from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism), illuminates how deities operated not merely as objects of pious worship, but as cultural currency shared across religious, commercial, and artistic institutions such as the kabuki theatre. The methodologies applied by my study also serve to address the utility of the Western-influenced doctrinal, sectarian-oriented tradition of scholarship that has come to inform our understandings of Asian religious traditions.

Courses

Religious Studies 100: Introduction to Religious Studies
Religious Studies 207: Buddhism
Religious Studies 290: Japanese Religions
Religious Studies 290AH: Religion and Asian Cinema
Religious Studies 307: Zen Buddhism
Religious Studies 388/488 AA: The Religious Landscapes of Kyoto and Nara (field trip course)

Recent Work

"Buddhism on the Battlefield: The Cult of the 'Substitute Body' Talisman in Imperial Japan (1890–1945)." In History and Material Culture in Asian Religions, edited by Benjamin Fleming and Richard Mann. Routledge (forthcoming).

"Shinto." In World Religions (East and West), edited by Doris Jakobsh, 246–262. Toronto: Nelson Canada, 2012.

"Localizing the Immovable One: The Meguro Fudo Cult in Early Modern Japan. In Images, Relics, and Legends: The Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites, edited by James Benn, Jinhua Chen, and James Robson. Oakville: Mosaic Press (forthcoming 2010).

"Forcing the Immovable One to the Ground: Revisioning a Major Deity in Early Modern Japan." Ph.D. dissertation. McMaster University, 2009.