Stephan Kigensan Licha is our newest faculty member. He comes to us from the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He received his PhD from SOAS (London) in 2012. Prof. Licha specializes in the intellectual history of Japanese Buddhism, with an emphasis on the interactions between the pre-modern tantric, Tendai, and Zen traditions, and the global history of Buddhist modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He has published widely on these topics, and his monograph, Esoteric Zen: Zen and the Tantric Teachings in Premodern Japan is forthcoming from Brill. 

Prof. Licha will be teaching "The Globalization of Japanese Religions: From the 19th Century to the Present" and our Core course, "Religion: Cosmos, Conscience, and Community II" in Winter Quarter and "Buddhist Meditation: Tradition, Transformation, Modernization" and "Buddhist Thought in Japan" next Spring Quarter.