Halle O’Neal is a Reader in Japanese Buddhist art in the History of Art department and Co-Director of Edinburgh Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. 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 material culture, reuse and recycling, performativity, and the spectacular visualisations of Buddhist embodiment. O'Neal is an Associate in Research at Harvard University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and sits on the editorial boards of Art in Translation and Art Bulletin.
She is the current recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 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 mourning, the visualisation of memory, and the haptic experience of Japanese palimpsests.
Select publications
- 2021: “Materiality.” In Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions, ed. Erica Baffelli, Andrea Castiglione, and Fabio Rambelli, 129-136.
- 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.
- Reviewed by Akiko Walley. caa.reviews (2020): http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3672#.YD5IGZP7Q1I
- Reviewed by Anna Andreeva. Journal of Japanese Studies 47, no. 1 (2021): 123-27.
- Reviewed by Cynthea Bogel. Monumenta Nipponica 75, no. 2 (2020): 333-41.
- 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
- 2021: with Paul Harrison. “Bodies of Words: Translating Sacred Text into Sacred Architecture in East Asian Buddhism.” In Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion, ed. Hephzibah Israel.
- 2022: “Marking Death: Stamped Buddhas and Embodied Writing.” Ars Orientalis 52.
- 2022: “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.”
