Meet the Faculty

Heather Blair

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

  • Ph.D. Harvard University, 2008

Contact Information

heablair@indiana.edu
Sycamore Hall, Rm 326
(812) 855-2495

BACKGROUND

  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Fellows and Religious Studies Department (2008-2009)
  • Weinstein Dissertation Prize, Yale University, Council on East Asian Studies  (2009)
  • Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2007-2008)
  • Fulbright-IIE Fellowship, University of Tokyo, Historiographical Institute (2005-2007)

Heather Blair

I specialize in the pre-modern history of Japanese religions, though my interests, training, and teaching range more broadly across   Buddhism and East Asian religions. Currently my research examines the religious practices of aristocratic lay people in Japan during the early medieval period – that is, during the 11th and 12th centuries. In order to expand our view of the religious lifestyles of un-ordained men and women, I study material culture and non-canonical, non-doctrinal texts. Thus, in addition to working with images and icons, I read narrative materials, and what might be called testamentary genres, such as diaries written by male courtiers and vows written by male literati on behalf of lay and monastic patrons of both sexes. 

I also have a long-standing interest in the creation and maintenance of religious sites and landscapes, both in metropolitan and wilderness contexts.  At present, I am working on a book, Peak of Gold, 1507 which examines the roles played by the mountain Kinpusen in ritual, politics, and textual production among political and social elites at the turn of the 11th century. 

Other current projects include a study of the ritual protocols for sutra burial; a history of the modern metamorphoses of an 11th-century bronze as it changed from an instantiation of a deity to scrap metal to high art; and a reconstruction of the ritual and discursive context for a 12th-century palimpsest manuscript of an apocryphal sutra about women’s ability to become buddhas.