Johan Elverskog

Courtesy Professor and Professor and Chair of Religious Studies

Email

johan[@]smu.edu
Office Location

Hyer Hall Room 300B
Phone

214-768-4127

Education

B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., Ph.D., Indiana University

Dr. Johan Elverskog is Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the department. He has published widely on the history of Buddhism across Asia and is the author and editor of seven books and numerous articles, which have won several awards and also been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Russian. He is currently working on two projects. The first is an environmental history of Buddhism, which is under contract with the Weyerhauser Environmental Book Series of the University of Washington Press. The second is an edited volume Sources of the Mongol Tradition, which is a comprehensive collection of Mongolian works covering the development of Mongolian civilization from the earliest beginnings until today, and is under contract with the Introduction to Asian Civilizations Series of Columbia University Press.

Courses Taught

  • Buddhism
  • Religions of China
  • Cultural History of Tibet
  • Introduction to Asian Religions
  • The World of Islam

Recent Publications

  • Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600-1920, co-edited with Hu Minghui. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2016.
  • “The Gutenberg Fallacy and the History of Printing among the Mongols.” In Printing as an Agent of Change in Tibet and Beyond, eds. H. Diemberger and M. Clemente. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
  • “The Mongols, Astrology, and Eurasian History.” Medieval History Journal 22, 1: (2016).
  • “The Buddha’s Footprint.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Spring (2015): 68-71, 109-110.
  • “(Asian Studies + Anthropocene)4” Journal of Asian Studies 73, 4 (2014): 1-12.
  • “Whatever Happened to Queen Jönggen?” In Buddhism in Mongolia, ed. Vesna Wallace, 73-94. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Distinctions

Elverskog’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Research Foundation, and the Andew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. He has also been a fellow at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at Ruhr Universität.
Johan Elverskog