Lucia Dolce is Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhism at SOAS, University of London, and Chair of the Centre of Buddhist Studies and the SOAS Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions. She holds a first degree in Japanese Studies from the University of Venice, Italy, and a PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. A historian of Japanese religion with a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, she combines archival research, philosophical analysis and extensive fieldwork to explore hermeneutical and ritual practices of Buddhism. She has published extensively, in English and in Japanese, on different forms of East Asian Buddhism; on ritual iconography and the visual culture of Japanese religion; on Shinto-Buddhist combinatory cults. Her current research project draws on unpublished documents recently uncovered in Japanese temples to map out the Buddhist discourse on ritual body. Relevant publications on the ‘Buddhist Body’ project: Dolce, L., “The Abhiṣeka of the Yogin: Bodily Practices and the Interiorization of Ritual in Medieval Japan”, in Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan: Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion and the Arts, edited by Fabio Rambelli and Or Porath, Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022, pp. 275-325; Dolce, L., “The Embryonic Generation of the Perfect Body: Ritual Embryology from Japanese Tantric Sources,” in Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions, Anna Andreeva and Dominic Steavu, eds. Leiden: Brill (Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series), 2016, pp. 253-310; Dolce, L., “Nigenteki genri no gireika: Fudō, Aizen to chikara no hizō 二元的原理の儀礼化——不動・愛染と力の秘像 [Ritualizing Duality: Fudō, Aizen and the Secret Iconography of Empowerment],” in Girei no chikara –chūsei shūkyō no jissen sekai 儀礼の力—中世宗教の実践世界 [The Power of Ritual: The World of Religious Practice in Medieval Japan], Dolce L. and Matsumoto Ikuyo eds., Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 2010, pp. 159- 206; Dolce, L., “Duality and the kami: Reconfiguring Buddhist notions and ritual patterns,” Cahiers d’Extreme-Asie 16 (special issue on “Medieval Shinto”), 2009, pp. 119-150.
