Prospective Graduate Students (click here)

New Faculty

We are pleased to welcome the following to our department:

Professor Steven Weitzman. (Previously of Indiana University) has recently joined the Stanford faculty. His field of research and teaching is Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature in its context in Greek and early Roman culture. Prof. Weitzman was also the Director of Jewish Studies at Indiana.

Professor Robert Gimello (Shinnyo-en Visiting Professor, Religious Studies)

A graduate of Columbia University, Professor Gimello is research professor at Notre Dame and has taught at Dartmouth, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Arizona, and Harvard. He is a specialist in Chinese Buddhism, with particular interest in Buddhist thought in the Tang and Song dynasties. He has co-edited Studies in Ch'an and Huayen (1983) and Paths to Liberation: The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought (1993), and is the author of numerous studies on Buddhist subjects. He will be teaching a course on Chinese Buddhism in Liao and Xisha kingdoms in spring term.

Professor Christian Luczanits (Visiting Professor, Religious Studies)

A graduate of the University of Vienna, Prof. Luczanits is a specialist in Buddhist art, with a research focus on India and Tibet. He is the author of Buddhist Sculpture in Clay: Early Western Himalayan Art, Late 10th to Early 13th Centuries (2004) and other works on the western Himalaya, as well as numerous contributions to the literature on Buddhist art in both Indian and Tibetan cultural contexts. He has taught at Vienna, Freie Universität Berlin, and U.C. Berkeley. He will be teaching courses on Buddhist art during the winter term.

David Kangas (Ph.D. Yale) is visiting from the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University. He specializes in the intersection between religion and continental philosophy and is the author of Kierkegaard's Instant. He is also a member of the translation team for Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks. His current research explores the religious and philosophical meaning of joy, focusing upon the Franco-German political philosopher Reiner Schurmann and the medieval mystic Marguerite Porete. He will be teaching a course on Kierkegaard during the fall quarter of 2009.