Lucia Dolce

Lucia Dolce is Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhism at SOAS, University of London and Chair of the SOAS Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions. She holds a first degree from the University of Venice (Italy) and a PhD from Leiden University (Netherlands), and has been visiting professor at several institutions in Japan and in Europe.

Lucia’s work combines archival research, philosophical analysis and fieldwork to explore hermeneutical practices of East Asian Buddhism and the performative and visual dimension of religion in Japan, with a focus on the medieval period. She has published extensively, in English and in Japanese, on distinct Buddhist traditions, from the Lotus Sutra and its Tendai and Nichiren interpretations to Tantric Buddhism, and on Shinto-Buddhist combinatory cults.

Her current research project draws on unpublished documents that have recently been uncovered in Japanese temples to map out the Buddhist discourse on ritual body, namely, how medieval monks articulated a fundamental Buddhist notion, duality and its overcoming, by re-conceptualizing the human body in ritual and visual terms.