Dr Halle O'Neal

Job title:

Reader in Japanese Art

Role:

Co-Director of Edinburgh Buddhist Studies

halle.oneal@ed.ac.uk
+44 (0) 131 650 2340

Office:

Room 0.49, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building

Office hours:

By appointment

Research Output:

Edinburgh Research Explorer link

Biography

Halle O’Neal is a Reader in Japanese Buddhist art in the History of Art department and Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is Co-Editor of the journal Buddhist Studies Review and an Association for Art History Trustee.

Previously, O’Neal worked as a Mellon Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University. O'Neal is an Associate in Research at the Reischauer, sits on the editorial board of Art in Translation, and served as the chair of The Art Bulletin from 2023-2025. In the winter of 2022-2023, she served as the Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor of Japanese Art History at the University of Heidelberg.

Her forthcoming book Dead Letters: Reuse, Recycling, and Mourning in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts is being published by Harvard University Asia Center in 2026. This project explores the materiality of mourning, the visualisation of memory, and the haptic experience of Japanese palimpsests as seen through the reuse and recycling of handwritten letters. Her first book Word Embodied (Harvard 2018) explored the performativity of word and image and relics and reliquaries. Her research has recently been supported by grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the ACLS Ho Family Foundation.

Research interests

Japanese Buddhist art
Epistolary culture
Reuse and recycling
Word and image studies
Relics and reliquaries
Performativity and haptics of manuscripts
Death commemorations in visual and material culture
Palimpsests
Digital Humanities

Teaching

Blood, bones, bodies: Buddhist relics in Asia (4th year)
Visions of the Buddha: Religious art in medieval Japan (3rd year)
Lectures for History of Art 1 (1st year)
Lectures for Art History: Texts, Objects, Institutions (3rd year)
Lectures for Global Middle Ages core course (MSc)
Art for the Afterlife: Buddhist Relics in Asian Material Culture (MSc)

Research

Monographs

2026 Dead Letters: Reuse, Recycling, and Mourning in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. (contracted)
2018 Word Embodied: The Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas in Japanese Buddhist Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.

Edited Volumes

2028 Co-editor with Sussan Babie, A Cultural History of Asian Art from 1200 to 1500, vol. 3 of six volumes in Cultural History of Asian Art, Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series, eds. Sussan Babie and Stephen Whiteman. (contracted)
2023 Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Visual and Material Cultures, vol. 52 of Ars Orientalis.

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters

2028 and Youn-mi Kim. “A Tale of TransAsian Love, Devotion, and Serpents: Shanmiao in Korean and Japanese Visual Narratives.” In A Cultural History of Asian Art from 1200 to 1500, ed. Sussan Babie and Halle O’Neal. (contracted)
2025 “Golden Icons, Splashed Ink, and Woodblock Prints: The Material and Visual Histories of Japan.” In Oxford Illustrated History of Japan, ed. Christopher Harding. (forthcoming)
2024 “Palimpsests on Purpose: Rethinking Intentional Erasure and Layers in Manuscript Culture.” In Palimpsests and Related Phenomena across Languages and Cultures, ed. Jost Gippert, José Maksimczuk, and Hasmik Sargsyan. 509-534.
2023 “Marking Death: Stamped Buddhas and Reused Letters in 13th-Century Japan.” Ars Orientalis 52, pp. 10-39.
2023 “Reuse, Recycle, and Repurpose: The Afterlives of Japanese Material Culture.” Ars Orientalis 52, pp. 1-9.
2022 and 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. 207-231.
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.
2015 “Performing the Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas: Relics, Reliquaries, and a Realm of Text.” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 3, pp. 279-300.
2012 “Continental Origins and Culture of Copying: An Examination of the Prototypes and Textualized Community of the Japanese Jeweled-Stūpa Mandalas.” Journal of Oriental Studies 22, pp. 112-32.
2008 “Building the Dharma: An Examination of Ryūhonji’s Jeweled-Stūpa Mandalas.” In Opposition and Fusion in Visual Art. Seattle and Kobe: Seattle Art Museum and Kobe University. 26-37.