Charlotte Eubanks

I am interested in material culture, performance studies, and book history with a focus on Japanese and Buddhist literature from the medieval period to the present. My first research area examines transnational (or prenational) Buddhism as a major literary force and as, simultaneously, a set of techniques and concepts for cultivating mind. The basic questions I’ve worked on here are: What does it mean to read a religious text? And, in what ways might literature be understood to map or record the workings of a mind? My second research area looks at transformations in visual culture as related to ideologies of colonization and war. The basic question I’m working on here is: How can art generally, and the museum specifically, be activated as a site of ethical engagement? My articles have appeared in Asian Folklore Studies, Book History, The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, PMLA, postmedieval, and Word & Image, among other places. I am an Associate Editor at Verge: Studies in Global Asias and in-coming Coeditor-in-Chief at postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.

I teach graduate level courses on global Japanese literature, sound studies, visual culture, book history, and global premodern theory. At the undergraduate level I teach courses on world literature, graphic novels, reading practice, and Japanese language and visual culture.