Congratulations to Jiang Wu, Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies, on being named a Regents Professor!
Interim Provost Ron Marx introduced Wu to the Arizona Board of Regents as the “recognized go-to scholar for Chinese and East Asian Buddhism.” Marx listed praise from international scholars for Wu’s ground-breaking first book Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-century China, published in 2008, including a statement that Wu is “one of the most productive and creative scholars of his generation.”
A leading scholar of Chinese and East Asian Buddhism, Wu’s research focuses on how the religion spread and how it has changed and been refined over many centuries. He has written multiple books on Chinese history, including Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia, which won the inaugural Tianzhu Book Prize for Excellence in Chan Studies from the Tianzhu Buddhist Network.
Wu received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2023 to support his project Scripture and Modernity: The Obaku Buddhist Canon in East Asia and the West, which examines a Buddhist text created in China and later reproduced in Japan. He was also awarded a Certificate of Congressional Recognition by U.S. Rep. Judy Chu of California and received the City of Rosemead, California, Award of Recognition in 2018.
As founding director of the university’s Center for Buddhist Studies, his leadership has significantly contributed to the center’s global reputation in the field.
Also approved as Regents Professors were Janko Nikolich, Department Head and Professor, Department of Immunobiology in the College of Medicine – Tucson, and Dennis Zaritsky, Professor, Department of Astronomy in the College of Science.
Regents Professor is the highest faculty rank at the University of Arizona, awarded to full professors whose exceptional achievements warrant national and international distinction. Appointments to this rank are limited to no more than 3 percent of the university’s tenured and tenure-track faculty members.
Wu is the second College of Humanities faculty member named as a Regents Professor in recent years, following Sonia Colina of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 2021.