Yagi Morris holds a PhD in Religious Studies from SOAS, University of London, specializing in medieval Japanese religions. Her PhD dissertation ‘The Kinpusen Himitsuden: Space, Myth and Ritual in a Medieval Cultic Site’ examines the intertwinement of esoteric Buddhist imperial liturgies and the cultic framework of the Ōmine Mountains in a text written for the legitimation of the southern court’s emperor and situated at the crossroads of religious and political realities. In her work, she attends to the innovative and creative potential embedded in moments of crisis and tries to understand how it effects the religious landscape. She is also broadly interested in sacred landscapes and pilgrimage practice as well as in the intersections between religion and polity. She is currently a Japan Foundation research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto, where she continues her work on medieval texts, imperial rituals and sacred landscapes. She is also the recipient of Fondazione 1536 postdoctoral fellowship for 2022-2024 at the University of Turin, where she will participate in a project of Political Thought and the Body.
For the Turin Humanities Programme she will work on the project Bodies at War: The Imperial, Divine and National Bodies in a Medieval Japanese Esoteric Buddhist Text.
