Disease, Defilement, and the Dead: Buddhist Medicine and the Emergence of Corpse-Vector Disease.
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 2025. Download the article here.

Corpses as Pathogenic Agents in Early Medieval Japan.
In Materialities of Disease Across the Medieval World: Images, Objects, and Remains, edited by Lori Jones. ARC Humanities Press: 2025.

I am assistant professor of East Asian religions at Oberlin College. My research explores the history of healing, disease, and the body in medieval Japanese Buddhism.

My first monograph, Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, is forthcoming with the University of Hawai'i Press (May 2026). This project is based on three years of archival research in Japan, conducted with grants from the Japan Foundation, the Japanese government, and the Takeda Science Foundation. During this earlier tenure in Japan, I was affiliated with the Research Center for Cultural Heritage and Texts at Nagoya University and the Kyōu Shooku library in Osaka. Much of the book was written during the 2022–2023 academic year, when I spent my sabbatical leave as an Early Career Research Fellow of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies at the Research Center for World Buddhist Cultures at Ryūkoku University.

I earned my Ph.D. in the Religion Department at Columbia University in 2019.