Yeti Kang, Workshop Coordinator
Danica Cao, Workshop Coordinator Emeritus
John Marvin, Workshop Coordinator Emeritus
John Marvin is a third-year PhD student in Philosophy of Religions and Philosophy (joint) at the University of Chicago. John studies the philosophy of mathematics (and areas for which it has important implications, like ontology) with attention to the broader context of intellectual history surrounding mathematical activity and the philosophy thereof. John’s research centers on the evolution of mathematics and the formalization of logic from the 19th century to the present alongside the development of such trends as the emergence of phenomenology, the divergence of analytic philosophy, and comparison of self-referential discourses across “mystical” texts and math/logic.
Audrey Guilbault, Workshop Coordinator Emeritus
Audrey Guilbault is a third-year PhD student in Philosophy of Religions and Philosophy (joint) at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on Buddhist philosophy, especially as produced in India and China between the 5th and 10th centuries CE, and especially with reference to ongoing debates in contemporary analytic philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and ethics.
Tyler Neenan, Workshop Coordinator Emeritus
Tyler Neenan is a fifth-year PhD student in Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His work is situated within a series of intersecting conceptions of the Real drawn from both Chinese and Western thought—most principally, Zhuangzi, Tiantai Buddhism, German Idealism, and Freudo-Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory. He is especially concerned with figures of self-division, self-relation, and self-contradiction as the generating points of a “something else” irreducible to simple finitude.
Rebekah Rosenfeld, Workshop Coordinator Emeritus
Rebekah Rosenfeld is a fifth-year PhD student in Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She studies the role of religious thought in the development of modern European philosophy. She is currently focusing on the history of dialectics and its intersections with Christian and Jewish thought.
William Underwood, Workshop Coordinator Emeritus
William Underwood is a seventh-year PhD student in the Philosophy of Religions program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He studies the relationship between modern European philosophy and American evangelical Christianity, in particular the adoption of philosophical critiques of modernity and secularism within contemporary evangelical networks. Recently, he has focused more closely on the reformulation of philosophical methods and aspirations as a response to a growing sense of political-historical catastrophe in post-war European milieus.
Stephan Licha, Faculty Sponsor
Stephan Kigensan Licha joined the faculty in 2023. He was most recently with 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 was recently published (2023) by Brill. A volume he coedited (with Hans Martin Krämer), Learning from the West, Learning from the East: The Emergence of the Study of Buddhism in Japan and Europe Before 1900) was also published by Brill in 2023.
Prof. Licha’s courses include “The Globalization of Japanese Religions: From the 19th Century to the Present” and our Core course, “Religion: Cosmos, Conscience, and Community II” as well as “Buddhist Meditation: Tradition, Transformation, Modernization” and “Buddhist Thought in Japan.”
Brook A. Ziporyn, Faculty Sponsor
Brook A. Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy. Professor Ziporyn received his BA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the Divinity School faculty, he has taught Chinese philosophy and religion at the University of Michigan (Department of East Asian Literature and Cultures), Northwestern University (Department of Religion and Department of Philosophy), Harvard University (Department of East Asian Literature and Civilization) and the National University of Singapore (Department of Philosophy).
Ziporyn is the author of Evil And/Or/As the Good: Omnicentric Holism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Brill, 2000), The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (SUNY Press, 2003), Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments With Tiantai Buddhism (Open Court, 2004); Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett, 2009); Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (SUNY Press, 2012); and Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents (SUNY Press, 2013). His seventh book, Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2016. He is currently working on a cross-cultural inquiry into the themes of death, time and perception, tentatively entitled Against Being Here Now, as well as a book-length exposition of atheism as a form of religious and mystical experience in the intellectual histories of Europe, India and China. Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, translated and with introduction and notes by Brook Ziporyn was published by Hackett in 2020, and his translation of the Daodejing was published by Liveright Books and the Norton Library in 2023.
Daniel A. Arnold, Faculty Sponsor Emeritus
Dan Arnold is Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Associate Faculty in South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is a scholar of Indian Buddhist philosophy, which he engages in a constructive and comparative way. Considering Indian Buddhist philosophy as integral to the broader tradition of Indian philosophy, he has particularly focused on topics at issue among Buddhist schools of thought (chiefly, those centering on the works of Nāgārjuna and of Dharmakīrti). He is the author of Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief: Epistemology in South Asian Philosophy of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2005), and Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind (Columbia University Press, 2012). He is presently working on an anthology of Madhyamaka texts in translation, to appear in the series “Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought.”
Ryan Coyne, Faculty Sponsor Emeritus