Raoul Birnbaum

Tue, 05/05/2009 - 1:16am — scotty
Faculty Main
Portrait: 

Raoul Birnbaum

Title: 
Professor and Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in History of Art and Visual Culture
On leave for Fall 2009
Email: 
rbirnb@ucsc.edu
Phone: 
Office: 831-459-4155
Buddhist studies, especially Chinese practices from medieval times to the present; religion and visual culture in China.
Research Interests: 

Raoul Birnbaum works in the multidisciplinary field of Buddhist studies, with special interest in Chinese Buddhist materials. His early studies focused on “deity” traditions – the worlds of the buddhas and bodhisattvas – and he has gone on to consider such topics as the construction of Buddhist geographies in China, visionary experience, and body practices in monastic settings, as well as topics in Buddhist history in modern China. Birnbaum’s work is informed by extensive, long-term study within Chinese Buddhist communities. In the visual field, he focuses on two broad areas, which are closely related: Buddhist analyses of the role of sense faculties in the construction of visions of reality, and constructed objects and performed actions meant to be seen within Buddhist environments.

Office: 
246 Kresge College
Office Hours: 
By Appointment
Mailing Address: 

Raoul Birnbaum
Kresge Faculty Services,
University of California at Santa Cruz,
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064

Selected Publications: 

Current research projects include: a volume co-authored with Bhikkhu Bodhi on the subject of “Buddhist engagement” (to be published by Open Court, 2010); an edited volume on “Buddhists at the end of life,” based on a conference held at UCSC in spring, 2009; and a volume well under way on the topic of “Buddhist expressive culture” in late imperial and modern China (18th through 20th centuries).

The Healing Buddha (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979; London: Rider, 1980; Boston: Shambhala, revised edition, 1989 [additional chapter and preface]; Italian translation, Rome: Ubaldini, 1981; German translation, Bern, Munich, Vienna: Otto Wilhelm Barth, 1982).

Studies on the Mysteries of Mañjusri: A Group of East Asian Mandalas and their Traditional Symbolism (Boulder: Society for the Study of Chinese Religions, 1983).

“Buddhist China at the Century’s Turn,” The China Quarterly, no. 174 (June, 2003), pp. 428-50. Reprinted in Daniel Overmyer, ed., Religion in China Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-44.

"Master Hongyi Looks Back: A 'Modern Man' Becomes a Monk in Twentieth-Century China," in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 75-124.

"Light in the Wutai Mountains," in The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 195-226.

"The Deathbed Image of Master Hongyi," in The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, ed. Jacqueline Stone and Bryan Cuevas (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), pp. 175-207.

Education and Training: 
Ph.D., Religion, Columbia University
M.Phil., Religion, Columbia University
M.A., Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
B.A. (Honors), Asian Studies, College of the City of New York
Professor
thumbnailcirc: