Bryan Lowe (site editor) is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Ritualized Writing: Sutra Transcription in Early Japan. He has published articles on sutra copying and Shōsōin documents in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies and the Princeton University Library Chronicle.
Chris Mayo (site editor) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He is currently completing his dissertation entitled “War and Religious Ritual in Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan.”
Sakaehara Towao (advisor) is Professor Emeritus of Japanese History at Osaka City University. In 1994, he was awarded the prestigious Kadokawa Gen’yoshi Prize for the best book on Japanese history for his monograph Nihon kodai senka ryūtsūshi no kenkyū 日本古代 銭貨流通史の研究. He has served as the chair of the Society for the Study of Wooden Documents (Mokkan gakkai 木簡学会), the Research Association on Excavated Coins (Shutsudo senka kenkyūkai 出土銭 貨研究会), the Research Association on Shōsōin Documents (Shōsōin monjo kenkyūkai 正倉院文書研究会), and the Research Center for the History of Tōdai-ji (Tōdai-ji-shi kenkyūjo 東大寺史研究所). Of his numerous publications on the Shōsōin, his introduction to the Shōsōin entitled Shōsōin mono nyūmon 正倉院文書入門 offers the best introduction to the collection to date.
Sol Jung (contributor) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She specializes in research on Korean and Japanese ceramic and tea culture, with particular interests in art historiography and the conception and application of aesthetic theory in non-Western contexts.
Matt McMullen (contributor) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley. His research centers on the development of Esoteric Buddhist scholastic traditions with a particular focus on late Heian-period Japan. He is currently a visiting researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Akiko Walley (conributor) is the Maude I. Kerns Assistant Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2009. She specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and archaeology from the 7th and 8th centuries and is currently working on a book manuscript on the bronze Shaka triad in the Golden Hall of Horyū-ji (Nara, Japan).
Yan Yang (contributor) is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art at Yale University. She is currently completing her dissertation, “The Tōji Landscape Screen and the Historiography of Yamato-e.”
