Beijing and Kyoto: Two Former BuddhistRoad Team Members Continuing International Careers

In recent years, the BuddhistRoad project has become an international research hub on Buddhism in Central Asia. The research team at CERES in Bochum is in permanent contact with a vast global network of renowned researchers in this field. The efforts in cultivating this research field both in terms of international cooperation as well as research contents have recently bore some fruitful developments: Two former BuddhistRoad team members have filled posts in prominent research institutions in China and Japan.

On October 16, 2020 Erika Forte started her current position as Professor for Art and Archaeology of Eastern Central Asia at the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, Japan. In this position she is also teaching Chinese Art History and Chinese History at the Institute for Liberal Art and Science at the same university. Erika Forte had been a research associate in the BuddhistRoad project from 01/2018 to 07/2019 focusing on art historical materials of Khotan before she started working on her stand-alone FWF project “Historical Remains in Context: Networks of Buddhist Monasteries in Central Asia” at the Institute for Culture and History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna.

Just recently, Haoran Hou has received confirmation to fill in a prestigious postdoctoral position in the Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar program at the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was working with BuddhistRoad as a research associate from 02/2019 to 01/2021 as an expert on Buddhism in the Tangut Empire. At the same time, he did complete his PhD thesis on Play of the Great Compassionate One: Life and Works of the Fourth rGyal dbang ’Brug chen Kun mkhyen Padma dkar po at Leipzig University, where he defended his doctoral thesis in 12/2020

“The BuddhistRoad team welcomes these recent career developments. Our aim to create a fruitful research environment with BuddhistRoad shows success” Carmen Meinert, the project’s principal investigator, says. “We wish them all the best in their new positions and are looking much forward to work with both colleagues together as associated researchers.”