Japanese Studies Teaching Staff
Dr Anna Andreeva
Contact Information
Email: andreeva@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de
Address:
Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context"
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
Current Position
Assistant Professor in Japanese History, Cluster of Excellence "Europe and Asia in a Global Context", University of Heidelberg
Affiliated Researcher, East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge
Biographical Details
Anna Andreeva received her BA from the Irkutsk Linguistic University in Siberia in 1997, where she was trained as translator in Japanese and English. She lived in Japan in 1998-2001 where she accomplished her MA in Japanese classical literature at Kanazawa University. Anna received her MPhil (2002) and PhD (2006) at Cambridge University, where she worked on the issues of esoteric Buddhism and Shinto in medieval Japan, before being awarded a postdoc at Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard for 2006-2007. During 2007-2010, she held the Margaret Smith Research Fellowship at Girton College. Currently, Anna is a research fellow and Assistant Professor in Japanese History at the Cluster of Excellence "Europe and Asia", based at Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. She is coordinating the project "Religion and Medicine in Premodern East Asia", teaching courses on Japanese Religions and working on her second book.
Research Interests
Anna Andreeva specializes in Japanese religions of the medieval and early modern periods, particularly, the relationship between esoteric Buddhism and kami worship, formation and development of combinatory worship at individual sacred sites, esoteric rituals, the economy of the sacred, myth, the culture of secret transmissions, and the forms of religiosity in early modern Japan.
She has delivered a number of talks at the EAJS conference in Vienna, at SOAS (London), Harvard, Columbia University and is now finishing a book manuscript on the religious history of Mt Miwa and the emergence of ‘medieval Shinto’. Her next project will be dedicated to the cross-cultural development and transmission of medical knowledge, particularly that related to female body and gender. This project will investigate the porous boundaries between ritual and religious practices of esoteric Buddhism related to medical treatments and the emergence of medicine as a scientific discourse in premodern East Asia.
Anna is an external member of the Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions at SOAS, member of the Council of the British Association of Japanese Studies, the American Academy of Religion, Association of Asian Studies, European Association of Japanese Studies.
Publications
| 2011 | ‘Miwaryû no seiritsu’ 三輪流の成立 (The Formation of the Miwa Lineage), an article solicited for a collective volume Medieval Literature and Medieval Shinto 中世文学と中世神道, ed. Ito Satoshi, in the eight-volume series on Medieval Literature and the Adjoining Disciplines 中世文学と隣接諸学 (Tokyo: Chikurinsha, forthcoming in March) |
| 2010 | ‘Miwa and Tendai: the traditions of esoteric worship in premodern Japan’, an entry to the encyclopedic project Esoteric Buddhism and Tantra in East Asia, eds. Charles Orzech, Hendrik Sorensen, Richard Payne (Brill: Leiden, forthcoming) |
| 2010 | ‘Medieval Shinto: New Discoveries and Perspectives’, in Religion Compass (Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming) |
| 2008 | ‘Problems in the study of materials attributed to the Miwa Lineage: texts, secret theories and rituals of Medieval Shinto’, in Japanese (‘Miwaryû kankei shiryô ni mirareru mondaiten: Chûsei Shintô no tekusuto, hisetsu, girei wo chûshin ni’), in The Global Stature of Japanese Religious Texts, ed. Abe Yasurô, pp. 256-264 (Nagoya University, Graduate School of Letters), |
| 2006 | 'Saidaiji Monks and Esoteric Kami Worship at Ise and Miwa', Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 33/2: 349-377 (Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture) |
