Biography
Duncan Ryuken Williams was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest at Kotakuji Temple (Nagano, Japan) in 1993. He served as a Buddhist chaplain at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2000. Currently, he is Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Previously, he held the Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley and served as the Director of Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies. Williams is the author of the LA Times bestseller and winner of the 2020 Religion News Association's Best Book Award American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019) about Buddhism and the WWII Japanese American internment; The Other Side of Zen (Princeton University Press, 2005), and editor of seven books including Issei Buddhism in the Americas (U-Illinois Press, 2010), American Buddhism (Routledge/Curzon, 1998), and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard CSWR, 1997). He has served as department chair for USC's School of Religion for five years.
Candidate Statement
I first learned about the American Academy of Religion as an undergraduate religion major at Reed College and became an AAR member during graduate school, with the good fortune of being able to present papers at the annual meeting in the Japanese Religions group and Buddhism sections as a young scholar. In the twenty-five years since my first presentation at a national AAR meeting, I have had the privilege of serving as a steering committee member and Co-Chair of the Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society group for a period of seven years and as a member and current Chair of the AAR American Lectures in the History of Religion (ALHR) committee. Through this engagement with the Academy and over the course of serving as a department chair of USC’s School of Religion, I have urged aspiring scholars of religion to find opportunities to engage the AAR even just by attending – other than the pandemic-related cancelled in-person annual meeting, I’ve benefited from never having missed the annual meeting since 1996.
I’ve also been an advocate of generating transformative scholarship on religion, bringing our research to public spaces and for the purpose of alleviating difficulties faced by various faith communities and beyond. In my case, as a scholar at a research university and a Buddhist priest serving a historic Japanese American Buddhist temple in Los Angeles, much of my public-facing work has been linked with using religious studies research to address anti-Asian and anti-Buddhist animus and violence as my community faces enduring questions of belonging as the nation debates whether America is essentially a White/Christian nation or a multiethnic and religious free and plural one.
This past year, for example, I co-organized the first national Buddhist memorial service in response to rising anti-Asian violence held forty-nine days after the 2021 Atlanta-area shootings. The gathering at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo – which had been the target of vandalism following a series of vandalism incidents at temples in Orange County’s Little Saigon – brought together 49 Asian American Buddhist monastics, priests, and leaders and we called attention to the long history of violence and exclusion of Asian American Buddhists. The gathering was viewed online by over 10,000 people, endorsed by several hundred temples/sanghas from around the country, and featured in major media outlets like the New York Times.
When we bring our study of classic texts, medieval rituals, and history of immigrant religion to assist a community which is in need of perspective, I believe we are fulfilling the AAR’s mission “to foster excellence in the academic study of religion and to enhance public understanding of religion.” I would bring this type of approach to the AAR At-Large Director position if I were fortunate enough to be elected.