D. Neil started following the work of Mariko Walter, ACANSRS: Association for Central Asian Civilizations & Silk Road Studies, Central Asian Buddhism.
D. Neil started following the work of Sarah Fraser, Northwestern University, Art History.
D. Neil started following 3 journals.
Country Director, DKT International Beijing
About
Neil Schmid pursued undergraduate study at Georgetown University and graduate studies at Waseda University, Tokyo, in turn completing a Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies (DEA) at l’Ecole pratiques des Hautes Etudes in Paris and his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, he was assistant professor at NCSU and the University of North Carolina, Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and adjunct assistant professor in the Asia Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. His research centers on a Chinese medieval archaeological site in the northwest of China known as Dunhuang. He is particularly interested in how medieval manuscripts, material culture, and ritual life mutually refract the quotidian sociality and its conceptual structures determinative of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Publications include “The Material Culture of Exegesis and Liturgy and a Change in the Artistic Representations in Dunhuang Caves, ca. 700-1000” (Asia Major, 2006 [2008]) , “Revisioning the Buddhist Cosmos: Shifting Paths of Rebirth in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Art” (Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 2008 [2010], and “‘Whosoever Writes this dhāraṇī …’ The Ritual Use of Dhāraṇī Lecterns in Medieval East Asia,” in preparation for Pacific World Journal. He is completing a monograph on religious culture at Dunhuang, entitled In Praise of The Transfigured: On Buddhist Poems and Paintings in Medieval China which reassesses the use and conceptualization of Pure land imagery in light of Chinese sociality and ritual interaction. Neil is also involved with a digitization project spearheaded by the University of Southern California in conjunction with Beijing University and the Kucha Research Academy to record a series of Buddhist caves at Qizil in the far west of China. Finally, he is director of a project supported by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (VNPF) to survey and digitally record the architecture, materials, and epigraphy of Thắng Nghiêm Temple (Chùa Thắng Nghiêm 勝嚴寺) outside of Hanoi. He is currently Country Director of DKT International, Beijing.
