Biography
Duncan Ryuken Williams is the Alton Brooks Professor of Religion and the Director of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California. A scholar of Japanese and Japanese American Buddhist history, he was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest in 1993. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2000 and is the author of The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton UP, 2005) and American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard UP, 2019), winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He is also the translator of four books and co-editor of seven volumes on Buddhism and race. He has served on the boards of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Yonex Corp. His most recent work is the Irei Monument, a Buddhist-inspired public memorial to honor those of Japanese ancestry incarcerated in America’s WWII internment camps.
Candidate Statement
The AAR has been my intellectual home for thirty years. I joined the American Academy of Religion in 1996 as a graduate student and presented my first paper at the national conference in New Orleans that year. It was a profound experience of discovering a community, which included a multiplicity of scholarly venues – the Buddhism section and the Japanese Religions, Buddhism in the West, Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society (ANARCS) units – where I would present and learn about the full range of my research interests that have sustained me ever since. My appreciation for the AAR has continued by serving the organization in a number of capacities such co-chairing a unit to chairing the American Lectures in the History of Religions (ALHR) selection committee.
At a time when the study of religion and the humanities as a whole have come under increased pressure to demonstrate relevance within our colleges and universities, the AAR as a professional organization is such an important community to share best practices for how to sustain and grow the study of religion within the broader academy as well as in public contexts.
Yet, in recent years, it’s not escaped the notice of many of us that accessibility of our Annual Meeting, a critical revenue source for our organization, is becoming prohibitively expensive. I believe that some of my experiences beyond the academy – such as helping found global culture centers in a half-billion dollar public diplomacy initiative of the Japanese government, consulting for films and TV shows ranging from Man in the High Castle to Shogun, or for gaming companies producing the forthcoming Last Sentinel, and serving on a publicly-listed corporate board in Japan – may assist with helping us creatively re-imagine some of our funding models. In looking back on my own early career, it would be my honor to work with the AAR leadership to continue to create a diverse and welcoming community that graduate students can afford to participate in.
This community is not only doing the critical work of creating a great forum for sharing ground-breaking research as the premier professional organization of our field, but translating our scholarship for the broader public to transform the world. If elected, I am committed to work alongside my colleagues to help lead the AAR during this challenging and transformative period for our organization.