Notes on Contributors
Ding Li 丁莉
is a professor in the Department of Japanese Language and Culture at Peking University and serves in the Research Center of Eastern Literature at Peking University. Her research interests lie primarily in Japanese classical literature, Sino-Japanese comparative literature and cultural relationships. Recently, she has focused on Japanese illustrated scrolls (emakimono), and Japanese classical literature and paintings. She has been leading a research project “Chinese Elements in Ancient Japanese Illustrated Scrolls” (
Ge Jiyong 葛繼勇
is a professor at Zhengzhou University. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Japanese Culture at Zhejiang University in 2006. His studies focus on the history of Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges, classical documents, and East Asian international relations. Dr. Ge has published dozens of scholarly articles and several monographs on early Sino-Japanese literary exchanges and the Book Road.
Hao Chunwen 郝春文
is a senior professor in the School of History at Capital Normal University, also serving as the head of the university’s Institute of Historical Studies. He received his doctorate in 1999 from the Department of History at Capital Normal University. His main areas of research are Dunhuang documents, Buddhism in China, and Chinese history, especially from the 3rd to 13th centuries. He has published numerous books and articles in the field of Dunhuang studies and medieval social and religious history, including a 30-volume series on the social history of Dunhuang based on materials preserved in the United Kingdom.
George A. Keyworth
received his Ph.D. in Chinese Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Keyworth previously taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 2001–2006, followed by three years as a researcher in Kyoto, Japan, from 2006–2009. In 2011, Dr. Keyworth joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada as an Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies and East Asian Religions. After receiving tenure in 2017, Dr. Keyworth transferred to the Department of History, where he teaches on premodern Chinese and Japanese history, Asian Studies, the history of religion in East Asia, and comparative manuscript studies.
Liu Yi 劉屹
is professor and dean of the School of History at Capital Normal University. His research interests include Dunhuang studies and the medieval history of religion. For the past twenty years, he has been working on the history of Daoism and Daoist scriptures. In terms of the former, he challenges the historical paradigm in which the sect of the Celestial Masters came directly down from the sect of the Five Pecks of Rice in early Daoist history. In terms of the latter, he has specialized in studies of such Daoist texts as Scripture on Great Peace, Xiang’er’s Commentary on Laozi, the Classic on Laozi’s Conversion of the Barbarians, and the Lingbao Scriptures of the Six Dynasties.
Ryan Richard Overbey
studies the intellectual and ritual history of Buddhism, with particular focus on early medieval Buddhist spells and ritual manuals. He studied at Brown University (AB in Classics & Sanskrit and Religious Studies, 2001) and at Harvard University (Ph.D. in the Study of Religion, 2010). He currently serves as the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Skidmore College.
Stephen Roddy
received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University (1990) and is currently Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of San Francisco. His research focuses on the intersections between institutional change and literary expression in late-traditional China and Japan. He has published articles and monographs on topics including representations of literati in late-imperial Chinese fiction, literati tea in Japan, early-modern Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean intellectual dialog, the Chinese examination essay, and key terms in Chinese literary thought.
Sha Wutian 沙武田
is a professor in the School of History and Civilization at Shaanxi Normal University, and a Research Fellow of the Dunhuang Academy. He also serves as an adjunct professor in the Institute for Dunhuang Studies at Lanzhou University. Dr. Sha has published numerous monographs and articles in the field of Dunhuang studies.
Michelle C. Wang
is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Georgetown University. A specialist in the Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, her first monograph, Maṇḍalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) analyzes the Maṇḍala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas at the Mogao and Yulin Buddhist cave shrines in northwestern China. In addition to her research on mandalas, she has also written about art and ritual, miracle tales of animated statues, the transcultural reception of Buddhist motifs, and text and image.
Lan Wu 烏蘭
teaches East Asian history at Mount Holyoke College. She is broadly interested in the role of religion in imperial formation in early modern times. She is the author of Common Ground: Tibetan Buddhist Expansion and Qing China’s Inner Asia (Columbia, 2022). She received her Ph.D. from the History-East Asia Program at Columbia University in 2016.
Wu Shaowei 武紹衛
is an associate professor in the School of History and Culture, Shandong University, and is a specialist in Dunhuang studies, Sui and Tang dynasty history, and the history of Chinese Buddhism. He has published on the cult of Mañjuśrī at Mt. Wutai, on the palindromic poem found in the Dunhuang manuscript S.3046, and on the literacy of Buddhist monks at Dunhuang.