Stanford University
Showing 1-10 of 12 Results
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Hongmin Ahn
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2026
BioHongmin Ahn is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he studies modern Korean and Japanese religions. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he connects religion, history, and anthropology by examining how the memories of colonization, war, and national division have shaped the lives of Korean religious communities, both in Korea and in diaspora (most prominently Japan).
Unified by an underlying focus on the body — one living, one dead — his research interests stretch across two seemingly disparate areas. The first turns to the living body in its most kinetic, yet monotonous, devotional form: prostration. He examines the emergence of prostration as a popular practice — often performed in sets of 108, 1,080, and 3,000 — in modern South Korea, asking how this bodily devotion rose to prominence as a means of coping with contemporary challenges that lay members face. Focused on sensorial, emotional, and spatial experience, he looks at how lay practitioners construct selfhood and subjectivity through this repetitive corporeal movement.
The second turns to the dead body: the remains of Koreans who died in Japan during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Unfolding the layered historical traumas left by the Japanese Empire, he explores the contested belonging of these bodies (both physical and spiritual) between the unwelcoming hostland and the divided homeland. He examines three types of posthumous care extended to them: ethnic care by fellow Korean religious communities, civic care by Japanese faith communities, and lastly, what he terms "violent care" by nationalistic Shinto institutions, most prominently Yasukuni Shrine.
Before Stanford, Hongmin was an IAFOR Global Fellow at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), The University of Osaka, and completed a year of Japanese-language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama. He holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts in the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions from Bard College. -
Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
BioChristopher 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
Master of Arts Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2025BioJulia 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.
