Hampshire College

Ryan Bongseok Joo, assistant professor of East Asian religions, holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (1996), an M.T.S. in the History of Religion from Harvard Divinity School (1999), and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Religion of Princeton University (2007).

A native of Korea, Ryan Joo has studied in China, Taiwan and Japan with funding from the Fulbright-Hays fellowship program, the Japan Foundation and the Center for Chinese Study at the National Taiwan Library. His scholarly interests include medieval Chinese and Korean Buddhism, religion and material culture, Buddhist modernism and transnationalism, and the interaction between religion and state. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled Buddhist Immortals, Eminent Ancestors and Disguised Bodhisattvas: the Cult of Arhat in Medieval China.

Affiliations
School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies

Recent Courses
Introduction to Modern Buddhism: Orientalism, Buddhist Psychotherapy, Brain Activities of Tibetan Monks (Spring 2010)
Topics in Comparative Religion (Spring 2010)
Decoding Zen Buddhism: Philosophy, Practice and History (Fall 2009)
Daoism, Shamanism and Shinto: Indigenous Religions of East Asia (Fall 2009)