Stephanie Balkwill

E-mail: balkwill@humnet.ucla.edu Office: Royce Hall 290

Associate Professor; Chair, Center for Buddhist Studies

Fields of Interest: East Asia, Buddhist Studies, Women in Early Medieval China, the Spread of Buddhist Traditions

Research

Stephanie Balkwill is interested in the literary and public lives of Buddhist women who lived in what is now China between the 4^th and 6^th 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 currently undertaking two major research projects in this area, each with its own series of publications. The first project examines the political lives of Buddhist women in the Northern Wei dynasty and puts forth the thesis that the Northern Wei offers the earliest known case study that we have for the confluence of women, Buddhism, and political power that is seen across East Asia in the medieval period. The second project examines the prominence of female-to-male sex transformation narratives in Mahāyāna Buddhist texts within the context of the gendered practice of the tradition in early medieval China.

At present, She is working on revisions to a book-length study of Northern Wei Empress Dowager Ling, entitled: Numinous Under Heaven: The Rise and Fall of a Female, Buddhist Regent in 6^th Century Luoyang.

She is also the co-Director of the Buddhist Bodies Collective. The aim of the project is to curate and publish new, Open Access, body-centered resources for the teaching of Buddhism at the introductory level and across the humanities more broadly. Follow us on Twitter: @bodiesbuddhist

Selected Publications

“Disappearing and Disappeared Daughters in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Sūtras on Sexual Transformation and an Intervention into Their Transmission History.”History of Religions (2021)
“Translation of the Sūtra Of the Unsullied Worthy Girl”Special Issue on Translation, Ed. Natasha Heller. Journal of Chinese Buddhist Studies (2021)
Co-authored with James Benn “Buddhist Statecraft.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism. Ed. Courtney Bruntz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
“A Virtuoso Nun in the North: Situating the Earliest-known dated biography of a Buddhist nun in East Asia.”Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies. 3.2 (2020): 129-161
“Why does a Woman need to Become a Man in Order to Become a Buddha?: Past Investigations, New Leads.”Religion Compass 12.8 (2018)
“The Sūtra on Transforming the Female Form: Unpacking an Early Medieval Chinese Buddhist Text.”Journal of Chinese Religions 44.2: 127-148 (2016)
“When Renunciation is Good Politics: The Women of the Imperial Nunnery of the Northern Wei (386-534).”Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China 18.2 (2016): 224-256