Dean Alain-Philippe Durand is pleased to announce the approval of the new Center for Buddhist Studies. This center will be located in the College of Humanities, in the Harvill Building. Dr. Jiang Wu will serve as the founding director of the Center for Buddhist Studies (CBS), effective July 1, 2017.

Dr. Wu is professor of East Asian Studies. He received his Masters degree from Nankai University (1994) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2002). His research interests include seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhism, especially Chan/Zen Buddhism, the role of Buddhist canons in the formation of East Asian Buddhist culture, and the historical exchanges between Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism. Other interests include Confucianism, Chinese intellectual history and social history, and the application of electronic cultural atlas tools in the study of Chinese culture and religion. He has published articles in Asia Major, Journal of East Asian History, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Monumenta Serica on a variety of topics. His first book Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-century China has been published by Oxford University Press in 2008. He is conducting research on the formation of the Jiaxing canon in late imperial China and writing a biography of Yinyuan Longqi. He is the recipient of several grants, from Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation, International Center for Buddhist Studies at Renmin University, National Science Foundation of China (NSFC), among others.