Staff

Director, USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture
Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Duncan Ryūken Williams is currently Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Religion, and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Williams’ latest monograph, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019) is the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Religion Award and a LA Times bestseller. Williams is also the author of The Other Side of Zen (Princeton) and editor of seven volumes including Hapa Japan (Kaya), Issei Buddhism in the Americas (Illinois), American Buddhism (Routledge), and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard). Find him online at duncanryukenwilliams.com.

E-mail: duncanwi@usc.edu

Associate Director, USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture
Professor (Teaching), Comparative Literature
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Jason Webb’s research interests lie in Japan’s seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries: the reception of Chinese texts in the archipelago, connections between literary theory and political authority, the architecture of royal poetic anthologies, and poetry composed in Japanese and Chinese. Jason publishes articles in both English and Japanese, most recently “East Asian Bibliographic Traditions and Current Japanese Premodern Archives Studies,” in Tajima Isao, ed., Kinri kuge bunko kenkyū, vol. 7 (2020), “F. V. Dickins’ Man’yōshū Poetics” (Man’yōshū Kodaigaku kenkyūnenpō, 2017, Japanese), and “The Big Business of Writing: Monjō keikoku in the Early Heian Court of Saga Tennō” (Sino-Japanese Studies, 2014). He currently is at work on a book-length manuscript about premodern Japanese archives and a co-edited volume entitled Before Nara.

E-mail: jasonweb@usc.edu

Program Administrator
USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture
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E-mail: shaugh@usc.edu