Forthcoming May 2026:
Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism.
University of Hawai'i Press. → Book cover and information here.
Translation of “The Five Forms Liturgy and the Five Viscera Mandala: The Genealogy of the Religious Body in Medieval Japan,” by Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎. Japanese Religions. → Download the article here.
Disease, Defilement, and the Dead: Buddhist Medicine and the Emergence of Corpse-Vector Disease.
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 2025. → Download the article here.

Corpses as Pathogenic Agents in Early Medieval Japan.
In Materialities of Disease Across the Medieval World: Images, Objects, and Remains, edited by Lori Jones. ARC Humanities Press: 2025.

I am associate professor of East Asian religions at Oberlin College. My research explores the history of healing, disease, and the body in medieval Japanese Buddhism. During my current sabbatical (June 2026 to January 2028), I am writing my second book, Everything Evil in You: Disease, Karma, and the Pathogen Pantheon in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. My research tenure, during which time I will be affiliated with Bukkyō University, is supported by the Japan Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Everything Evil is the sequel to my first monograph, Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, which is forthcoming with the University of Hawai'i Press (May 2026). This project is based on three years of archival research in Japan, conducted with grants from the Japan Foundation, the Japanese government, and the Takeda Science Foundation. During this earlier tenure in Japan, I was affiliated with the Research Center for Cultural Heritage and Texts at Nagoya University and the Kyōu Shooku library in Osaka. Much of the book was written during the 2022–2023 academic year, when I spent my sabbatical leave as an Early Career Research Fellow of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies at the Research Center for World Buddhist Cultures at Ryūkoku University.

I earned my Ph.D. in the Religion Department at Columbia University in 2019.