Dr Halle O'Neal | Edinburgh College of Art

Job title: Reader

Role: Director of Research, History of Art

Office address: Room 0.49, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building

Contact time: By appointment

Research outputs: Dr Halle O'Neal on Edinburgh Research Explorer

Halle O’Neal, a specialist in Japanese Buddhist art, is a Reader and Director of Research in the History of Art department and an Associate in Research at Harvard University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Previously, she worked as a Mellon Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University. Her research and teaching explore areas of word and image, relics and reliquaries, invisibility in visual and material culture, reuse and recycling, performativity, and the spectacular visualisations of Buddhist embodiment. O'Neal is the co-director of the Edinburgh Buddhist Studies network and sits on the editorial boards of Art in Translation and Art Bulletin.

She is the recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies for 2020-21, during which time she will develop her current monograph project, “Writing against Death: Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts.” This project explores the materiality of death and mourning and the visualisation of memory and embodiment in Japanese letter sutras.

Research Interests

Japanese Buddhist art
Word and image studies
Relics and reliquaries
Performativity
Death commemorations in visual and material culture
Palimpsests
Digital Humanities

Select publications

2019: “Inscribing Grief and Salvation: Embodiment and Medieval Reuse and Recycling in Buddhist Palimpsests.” Artibus Asiae 79, no. 1, pp. 5-28.
2018: Word Embodied: The Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas in Japanese Buddhist Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
- *Reviewed by Richard Bowring, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82, no. 3 (2019): 583-85.
- *Reviewed by Kerry Lucinda Brown. Art Inquiries 17, no. 4 (2019): 492-95.
- *Reviewed by Christine M. E. Guth. Religion and the Arts 23, no. 5 (2019): 593-95.
- *Reviewed by Pamela D. Winfield. Material Religion 16, no. 1 (2019): 123-24.
2015: “Performing the Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas: Relics, Reliquaries, and a Realm of Text.” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 3, pp. 279-300.

Forthcoming and contracted publications

2020: with Paul Harrison. “Translating Sacred Forms: Textual Pagodas in China, Korea, and Japan.” In Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion, ed. Hephzibah Israel.

2021: “Objects and Materiality.” In Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions, ed. Erica Baffelli, Andrea Castiglione, and Fabio Rambelli.

2022: “Marking Death: Stamped Buddhas and Embodied Writing.” Ars Orientalis 52

2022: with Claire-Akiko Brisset. “Reusing, Recycling, and Repurposing Across Japanese Cultural Productions.” Ars Orientalis 52.

In progress

Book: Writing Against Death: Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts.

Article: “There, but Not Seen: The Paradoxical Case of Invisibility in Buddhist Visual Culture.”

Select fellowships and awards

2021-22: Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship

2020-21: ACLS Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies

2017-19: British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant

2017: College Art Association (CAA) Millard Meiss Publication Fund for Word Embodied

2017: Japan Art History Forum (JAHF) First Book Subvention Prize for Word Embodied

Current PhD students

Colin Brady
Alina Sinelnyk

Abstraction in Chinese Contemporary Ink Painting
Alba Wang

Tradition-rediscovery and Trans-cultural Dialogues: Chen Shizeng and Beijing School of Painting, 1876-1923
Po-han Yang

Academic staff profile Dr Halle O'Neal

Associated programmes

Current PhD students

PhD Supervision Topics

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