Jiang Wu is the Sarina and Ho Pak Kong Professor in Buddhist Studies and Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Regents’ Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is also special-term professor at the School of Oriental Languages and Philosophy and Inamori Business School, Zhejiang Gongshang University. He received his PhD in 2002 from Harvard University, specializing in Chinese Buddhism. He is the author of numerous articles and two major monographs published by Oxford University Press: Enlightenment in Dispute and Leaving for the Rising Sun. He has also coedited several influential volumes on the Chinese Buddhist canon, including Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon (Columbia University Press, 2016), Reinventing the Tripitaka: Transformation of the Buddhist Canon in Modern East Asia (Lexington Books, 2017), and Regional Religious Systems in Greater China (Routledge Spatial Humanities Series, 2022). From 2017 to 2026 he served as the founding director of the Center for Buddhist Studies and has previously acted as the interim head of both the Department of East Asian Studies and the Department of Religious Studies and Classics. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 to support his work on the history of the Ōbaku Canon and its transnational transmission in China, Japan, and Britain.

Jeffrey Liu is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Dakota. He earned his PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona in 2024. His research applies digital humanities (GIS & spatial analysis) to the religious and cultural history of late imperial China, focusing societal engagements with Buddhist monasteries derived from the Wulin fanzhi (Monastic Gazetteer of Hangzhou). He has worked on Hangzhou Buddhist culture since 2019, including geoparsing the Hangzhou fuzhi (2020) and organizing spatial datasets for the Regional Religious Systems project (2021–2023). He also assisted with the Symposium on Jiangnan Buddhist Traditions (2021) and curated data for an online art exhibition on Yinyuan Longqi (2022). His research has been supported by the Khyentse Foundation, the Lingyin Buddhist Studies Fellowship, the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, and the Sheng Yen Education Foundation’s Chinese Buddhist Studies Research Grant. He has published “The Making of a Sacred Landscape: Visualizing Hangzhou Buddhist Culture via Geoparsing a Local Gazetteer, the Xianchun Lin’an zhi 咸淳臨安志” in Religions. At the University of South Dakota he teaches courses in world history and religions, East Asian history, Buddhism, and digital humanities.

Ines Ziling Wan is Research Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Dakota. She earned her PhD in East Asian Studies and MS in Geographic Information Systems Technology from the University of Arizona in 2026. Her research focuses on Buddhist miracle tales, Chan Buddhism, and digital humanities, particularly GIS. Through the miracle tale collection compiled by Huishan Jiexian, former abbot of Lingyin Monastery, she examines how miracle narratives served as speech acts that authenticated karmic retribution and legitimized religious authority, while their circulation was shaped by regional systems. Since 2019, she has worked on the Hangzhou Buddhist Culture Project and the Regional Religious System Project at the Center for Buddhist Studies, University of Arizona, studying Hangzhou gazetteers and spatial data on Buddhist monasteries. Her peer-reviewed article on Buddhist monasteries in Southern Song Hangzhou (Religions, 2022) won the Lingyin Buddhist Studies Best Paper Award. Her research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and Khyentse Foundation and recognized with the China Times Cultural Foundation’s Young Scholar Award and Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council’s Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Grant.

James Baskind earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University, specializing in Ming Buddhism’s influence on Edo-period Ōbaku Zen. He has taught at the University of Arizona, Nanzan University, and Kyūshū Institute of Technology, and previously held the position of Associate Professor at Nagoya City University. His work has been supported by numerous grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Notable works include co-editing The Myōtei Dialogues (Brill, 2015), “The Pure Land Is No Heaven” (History of Religions, 2018), “All or Nothing” (Religions, 2024), “A Daoist Immortal among Zen Monks” (The Eastern Buddhist, 2012), and “Poetry and Tea: A Blending of Genres” (Global Tea Hut, 2023). His research explores Japanese intellectual history, Buddhist-Christian polemics, and tea culture.

Jinhui Wu is Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Chapman University. She earned her PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona and her MA in Chinese Language and Civilization from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on Chinese popular and Buddhist literature and thought from the seventeenth century to the early Republican era, with particular attention to narrative imagination and visual–textual forms. Working at the intersection of literary studies, religious studies, and cultural history, she examines how Buddhist cosmology, vernacular narrative, and print culture shaped moral imagination and social identity in late imperial and modern China. She is also interested in the afterlives of traditional motifs and narrative structures in modern literature, film, and digital media, especially the role of visualization technologies in reconfiguring cultural memory. She is the recipient of several national and international fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and a Khyentse Foundation Graduate Student Award. Before joining Chapman University, she taught at Reed College, Rollins College, and Lafayette College.

Albert Welter is a retired professor at the University of Arizona, specializing in East Asian Buddhism, particularly in China during the transition between the Tang and Song dynasties and its impact in Japan during the Kamakura period. His involvement in the Hangzhou Region Buddhist Culture Project, supported by the Khyentse Foundation, served as the inspiration for focusing on the Hangzhou region as integral for developments in Chinese and East Asian Buddhism. Among his works related to Hangzhou Buddhism are his monograph A Tale of Two Stūpas: Histories of Hangzhou Relic Veneration Through Two of Its Most Enduring Monuments (Oxford University Press, 2022); The Role of Hangzhou in the Spread of East Asian Buddhism (guest editor, special issue of the International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture, 2022); Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies: Chinese Chan Buddhism and Its Spread Throughout East Asia (coeditor, SUNY Press, 2022); Buddhist Culture in the Greater Hangzhou Region (Jiangnan) and Its Dispersion Throughout East Asia (guest editor, special issue of Religions, 2024).