Mikaël Bauer
Director, School of Religious Studies
Associate Professor of Japanese Religions (Buddhism), School of Religious Studies
Associate Member, Department of East Asian Studies
B.A., M.A. (Louvain)
Ph.D. (Harvard)
Mikael Bauer studied Japanese Buddhism and History at several Japanese universities, Leuven University in Belgium and Harvard University. His main interests concern the relation between Buddhism and state, the connection between doctrine and ritual, and the material and performative aspects of Buddhist and Shinto rites.
After having completed a B.A and M.A in Japanese studies at the Catholic University of Louvain (KULeuven), he first spent several months in Varanasi, India, to start his study of Sanskrit. After having completed this introduction, he received a grant from the Europalia Belgium-Japan Foundation to start his doctoral research at Kanazawa Daigaku in Japan. He did so under the guidance of Professor Paul Hoornaert, a specialist of Tibetan and Classical Chinese Buddhism. Following his stay in Kanazawa, he received a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education to start a research period at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies (Osaka Gaidai) from 2000-2001. After eighteen months he entered Otani Daigaku in Kyoto where he studied with Professor Robert Rhodes and Professor Aramaki Noritoshi. Following his stay in Kyoto till 2003, he entered the doctoral program at the Department of East Asian Studies at Harvard University. Studying under Prof, Ryuichi Abe he completed a dissertation on the major monastic complex Kofukuji through the temple’s main ritual, the Yuima-e or Vimalakirti Assembly. During his stay at Harvard he was also fortunate to study Japanese history under Mikael Adolpson, and he was assistant for several courses on Japanese Buddhism, history and literature.
Mikael Bauer has written extensively on pre-modern Japanese rituals, lineages and sovereignty. He has published in Monumenta Nipponica, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Pacific World, Etudes Asiatiques and The Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University. He has contributed book chapters on Japanese Buddhism in several volumes and has organized a number of international conferences on pre-modern Japanese religion, history and literature. His most recent projects were the history of Yamashina dera, and the translation of the Fujiwara House Chronicle, the Tōshi Kaden, in April 2020. Currently, he is working on a ritual history of the Fujiwara clan temple, Kōfukuji. From 2017, he has organized three annual conferences at McGill with the support of BDK Canada and the Japan Foundation.
He welcomes M.A and Ph.D students wishing to specialize in an any aspect of Classical or Medieval Japanese Buddhism.
Fellowships:
Japan Foundation Conference Support Grant, 11.400 CAD, 2018.
Sasakawa Foundation Research Grant, 2013.
Japan Foundation Research Grant for project ‘The Institutional and Doctrinal History of Kōfukuji’, 2012.
Reischauer Institute Supplementary Dissertation Grant, 2010-2011.
Research Fellowship from the Society for the Promotion of Buddhism (BDK), Kyoto Prefectural University, January-August 2009.
Japan Foundation Research Fellowship, declined in favor of the BDK Fellowship, January-August 2009.
Reischauer Institute Graduate Student Associate, 2007-2010.
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies: Language Study Fellowship, Kanbun Workshop at the University of Southern California, July-August 2006.
Research Fellowship of the Japanese Government, Ōsaka University of Foreign Studies, Japan, October 2002- April 2004.
Honda Foundation Fellowship, Kanazawa University, Japan, September 2002.
Europalia Japan-Belgium Fellowship, Kanazawa University, Japan, August 2001- December 2001.
Public lecture
'The Wings of the Sovereign: The Religious and Institutional Policies of Fujiwara no Nakamaro (706-764)' Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, April 14, 2017.