About the Event
An AAR Fall Fridays WebinAAR
Hosted by AAR’s Buddhism Program Unit
As part of the Fall Fridays Scholarship WebinAAR Series, this webinar will engage Dr. Stephanie Balkwill’s innovative and field-changing monograph, The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century (University of California Press, 2024). In this book, Balkwill articulates a methodology she dubs “Buddhist feminist historiography” in writing an innovative social and political history of female leadership during the Northern Wei dynasty in medieval China.
Dr. Balkwill’s historiography is feminist because it seeks to challenge not just the content of history writing focused on “great men” by centering a female ruler but the very methodologies that produce what she calls “’great men’ history.” Balkwill’s feminist historiography is “Buddhist” in that it prioritizes Buddhist sources over those of the history writing of the Ru class, highlighting the Buddhist nature of the Empress Dowager’s leadership and illuminating a pivotal historical moment in which new models of Buddhist sovereignty were emerging.
In this webinar, five scholars of Buddhist Studies with varying area expertise who all share an interest in historiographical methodologies and feminist approaches will engage Dr. Balkwill’s book. Dr. Balkwill will respond.
AAR Fall Fridays is a webinAAR series that will highlight the scholarship coming from our varied AAR program units. This series — part of our larger year-round programming initiative — aims to bring the scholarship of our program units to the wider AAR membership and make it accessible outside of the Annual Meeting. These webinAARs will take place at 12:00 noon ET on Fridays and run from late September up until the in-person Annual Meeting in November.
Event Guidelines
Please note: AAR membership is not required to register for this event. In order to register, you will need to login or create an account if you don’t already have one. Creating an account is free, quick and easy and enables us to let you know about related upcoming events.
For assistance, please view our video walkthrough. You can adjust the playback speed on the video next to the closed caption icon. If you still have questions, please contact us.
Panelists
Stephanie Balkwill is an associate professor of Chinese Buddhism at UCLA. She conducts research on the literary and public lives of Buddhist women who lived in what is now China between the 4th and 6th centuries. Her research engages the question of whether or not Buddhist affiliation provided new social and educational opportunities for women in early medieval China, and, in turn, argues that women were influential in the early spread of the Buddhist tradition throughout East Asia. She is also the Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at UCLA.
Kevin Buckelew specializes in the study of Chinese Buddhism. His research explores themes of gender, authority, language, and moral responsibility. He is the author of Discerning Buddhas: Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Chan Buddhism (Columbia, 2025) and co-editor of Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia, 2023).
Amy Paris Langenberg is a professor of religious studies at Eckerd College. Her research is focused on gender and sexuality in premodern South Asian Buddhism, female Buddhist monasticisms, and contemporary Buddhist feminisms. She is the author of Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom (Routledge 2017). Her collaborative book project with Ann Gleig on sexual abuse in North American and transnational Buddhist convert communities is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
Bruno Shirley is an adjunct lecturer in transcultural studies at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He is a historian of Buddhism and gender in second millennium Sri Lanka. His forthcoming monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka (Arc Humanities Press, January 2026), rewrites the history of Sri Lanka’s Poḷonnaruva period — a critical juncture in the emergence of Theravāda Buddhism — and argues for a more complex narrative of gendered politics obscured in later monastic chronicles. He is assistant editor for the Buddhist Studies Review.
Nicholas Witkowski is an assistant professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian Religions at the University of San Diego. His current project, Lifestyles of Impurity, is a study of low-/outcaste ascetic communities in first millennium South Asia that employs the theoretical armature of historians of the everyday and ritual theories of (im)purity. This will be the first book-length academic project that integrates feminist, Marxist, post-colonialist and Foucauldian literary critical approaches to the study of textual sources documenting the socio-religious practices of low-/outcaste communities.
Jessica Zu is an assistant professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China. Her research uncovers surprising ways that ancient Buddhist processual philosophy was reinvented by marginalized groups to transform the self, seek justice, build community, and change the world.
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