School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-15 of 15 Results
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Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024BioChristopher Spencer Gurley, Jr is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where he specializes in American Religion and is pursuing a Ph.D. minor in history. His research explores the intersection of African American history and U.S. Catholic cultural life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is specifically interested in the religio-racial histories of U.S. Catholicism, Black identity constructions, Catholicism in the rural south, and the socio-historical politics of class and belonging regarding Black masculinity and manhood.
Before joining the Stanford community, he studied U.S. History at Georgetown University as a Patrick Healy Fellow. Chris earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science from Tennessee State University and his Master of Theological Studies degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School. He also holds a Master of Arts in Religion degree from Yale Divinity School, where he was chosen to become an Elie Wiesel-Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar at Oxford University. -
Julia Hirsch
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2021
BioJulia Hirsch is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where she focuses on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a B.A. from Boston College in Philosophy with minors in Psychoanalytics and Women’s & Gender Studies (2015). She received her M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology: Religious Arts of Asia from SOAS University of London (2020).
Julia’s current research explores Buddhist material religion and visual culture, power objects, and ritual from an art-historical perspective. Of particular interest are relic cults, funerary rites, and the importance—and soteriological potential—of sensory encounter in South Asian and Himalayan traditions.
Prior to joining Stanford, Julia worked for several years at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, where she continues to serve as a contributing editor covering Buddhist art, film, and publishing. -
Elaine Lai
COLLEGE Lecturer
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2018BioElaine Lai is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) who has spent over a decade of her life working and studying in Nepal, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, and China, where she made many lifelong friends.
Elaine is a scholar of Buddhism, trained in the languages of Tibetan, Chinese, and Sanskrit. She specializes in a tradition known as the Great Perfection in Tibet. Elaine’s recent research explores the relationship between Buddhist literature and time, specifically, how form and content interplay to cultivate more compassionate temporal relationalities. Elaine is committed to making the study of Buddhism accessible to a wider audience through technology and the arts. As a part of her dissertation, she created an intertextual heatmap to trace the citational history of a scripture throughout an important corpus of Great Perfection literature. Elaine also created a virtual reality (VR) experience to present Great Perfection history in a novel way.
At Stanford, Elaine has co-taught different courses in Religious Studies and guest lectured in Asian American Studies. In 2022, Elaine is proud to have created and taught the course “Queering Buddhism: Gender, Sexuality, and Liberatory Praxis.” This course sought to investigate the possibilities and constraints to “queering” or transforming any institution, and how the fields of queer studies and feminist studies might constructively and ethically be in conversation with Buddhist theories of liberation. In her pedagogy, Elaine emphasizes the importance of reciprocity, respect, and co-creation. Elaine is a firm believer that the process of how we engage in dialogue is as important, if not more important, than what the ultimate outcome of our conversations might be.
In Elaine’s free time, she writes screenplays (film and TV), spanning the genres of comedy, sci-fi, animation, historical drama, and more. -
Kedao Tong
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2018
BioKedao Tong is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religious Studies. His research focuses on the socio-cultural history of Chinese Buddhism and topics related to animals in the Chinese and the broader East Asian contexts. He is currently writing his dissertation, tentatively titled "Rescue the Buddha’s Animal Disciples: The Practice of Buddhist Animal Release in China," which explores the the history of animal release (fangsheng) in Chinese religions from the fifth to the early twentieth centuries.
Kedao received an MA in Chinese from Stanford University, where he wrote a thesis that studies the writing of women’s epitaphs from China’s Northern Dynasties (439-581 AD). Prior to coming to Stanford, he received an Honors BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. He has taken up coursework and language training in Hong Kong and Japan, and has a background in editorial work in academic and other settings.
