Associate Professor, Japanese Buddhism, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Ph.D., Harvard University
duncanw@berkeley.edu
Williams works primarily on Japanese Buddhist history, Buddhism and environmentalism, and American Buddhism. He is the author of The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, 2005), translator of four Japanese books, and editor of three volumes including American Buddhism (Curzon, 1999) and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhism and the World War Two Incarceration Experience (forthcoming, UC Press) and an edited volume, Issei Buddhism in the Americas: The Pioneers of the Japanese-American Buddhist Diaspora. His next project focuses on Buddhism and bathing practices in Japan through the themes of healing and purification.