Professor Megan Bryson | Associate Professor and Associate Head, University of Tennessee
Professor Bryson’s research focuses primarily on themes of gender and ethnicity in Chinese religions, especially in the Dali region of Yunnan Province. The geographical specificity of her work is balanced by its temporal breadth, which ranges from the Nanzhao (649-903) and Dali (937-1253) kingdoms to the present, as reflected in her monograph, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016), which traces the worship of a local deity in Dali from the 12th to 21st centuries.
https://religion.utk.edu/faculty/bryson.php
Dr. John Guy | Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia, Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dr Guy was senior curator of Indian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum for 22 years prior to joining The Met in 2008. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as an advisor to UNESCO. He has conducted extensive field research on Buddhist and Hindu South Asia, and participated in maritime excavations. One of his many research interests is the subject of Buddhist art in the Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms, particularly cross-cultural influences on the Buddhist iconography of the Yunnanese Acuoye Guanyin. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India (2011), Interwoven Globe (2013), Lost Kingdoms. Hindu Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014), The Lion Avatar in Indian Temple Drama (2016), Y. G. Srimati and the Indian Style (2017), and Crowns of the Vajra Masters: Ritual Art of Nepal (2018).
https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/asian-art/staff-list
Professor Angela Howard | Professor of Asian Art, Specializing in Buddhist Art of China and Central Asia, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences
Professor Howard’s teaching spans Chinese and Japanese art. Her research, however, has focused primarily on the development of Buddhist art in China, as signalled by her first book, The Imagery of the Cosmological Buddha (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1986). Starting in 1985, with the support of a series of NEH Fellowships, Professor Howard became deeply involved with the Buddhist art of southwest China (Sichuan and Yunnan). Her work recording Buddhist cave and cliff sculptures in southwestern China has led to two ground-breaking articles: “Tang Buddhist Sculpture of Sichuan: Unknown and Forgotten,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 60 (1988): 1-164 and “The Dharani Pillar of Kunming, Yunnan. A Legacy of Esoteric Buddhism and Burial Rites of the Bai People in the Kingdom of Dali (937-1253), Artibus Asiae, 57, 1 / 2 (1997): 33. Afterwards, in Summit of Treasures, Buddhist Cave Art of Dazu, China (Trumbull, CT: Weatherhill, Inc., 2001), Professor Howard published the result of her fifteen-year research on the monumental cave complexes of the Baodingshan site at Dazu, Sichuan.
https://arthistory.rutgers.edu/faculty-menu/full-time-faculty/73-howard
Professor Elizabeth Moore | Emeritus Professor, Department of History of Art and Archaeology, School of Arts, SOAS University of London
Professor Moore has undertaken research in Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, and Thailand. Prior to completing her PhD at the Institute of Archaeology (UCL) she worked in Nairobi, Jakarta and Singapore. She joined SOAS in 1992, where she developed a broad-based undergraduate and graduate syllabus for Southeast Asian art and archaeology, including ancient and contemporary aspects of mainland and island areas.
https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff31462.php
Dr. Heidi Tan | Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of History of Art and Archaeology, School of Arts, SOAS University of London
Dr Tan was a founding curator of the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore where she worked since 1996. She was responsible for developing the Southeast Asian collections and permanent galleries of the museum. She curated a series of special exhibitions in collaboration with regional museums in Southeast Asia including: Vietnam: From Myth to Modernity (2008), Sumatra: Isle of Gold (2010), Enlightened Ways: The Many Streams of Buddhist Art in Thailand (2012) and most recently contributed to Cities and Kings: Ancient Treasures from Myanmar (2016). She is currently working on a project to reassess the significance of bronze Buddha images in Myanmar in order to study historical exchanges between this region and the Nanzhao-Dali Kingdoms (7th – 13th centuries).
https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff104946.php
Professor Bin Yang 楊斌 | Professor, Department of Humanities, University of Macau
Professor Yang’s research interests are: Chinese History, World History (Sino-Southeast Asian-Indian triangular Interactions), History of Science, Technology and Medicine. His current projects are: The Gu （蛊）: Disease, Witchcraft and Sorcery, Love Magic, and Chinese Empire Building (book manuscript), Red Guards in Burma (1960s-1980s): An Oral History.
https://fah.um.edu.mo/staff/staff-history/bin-yang/
Professor Kathy Ku Cheng Mei 古正美 | Associate Professor, National Cheng Kung University, NCKU, Tainan, Taiwan
Professor Ku has undertaken research on the implementation and development of Mahayana Buddhist political history or Mahayana Buddhist nation-building beliefs in Asia for more than 30 years. Her research spans Central Asia to Southeast Asia, and focuses on different periods in the long history of Buddhist religion. A focus is the iconography and history of the Avalokiteshvara and Avatamsaka Buddharaja traditions in different Asian regions. Her most recent study is a detailed analysis of Zhang Shengwen’s Long Scroll (2018), in which she examines the history and development of Buddhism in Yunnan.
http://140.116.13.2/chinese/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=89&Itemid=92
http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/DLMBS/en/author/authorinfo.jsp?ID=30280
Professor Charlotte Galloway | Honorary Associate Professor, Asian Art History and Curatorial Studies, Director Myanmar Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra
Dr Galloway is an Asian art historian specialising in the early art of Myanmar. With a background in museums, her more recent activities have supported colleagues in Myanmar to document archaeological collections at the first millennium Pyu sites of Sri Ksetra and Halin. She is involved in research collaborations at Bagan, and her current projects also engage with cultural heritage issues. Her ongoing research interests lie in the development of Myanmar’s early Buddhist imagery, and its broader regional connections.
https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/galloway-ck