Dr. Yongshan He

Title: Assistant Professor; JMP Chair
Office: 4M42B
Email: y.he@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:

Yongshan He completed her PhD degree at the University of Toronto (2024), and is preparing her first monograph based upon her dissertation "Making Faces for Buddha: Affect, Statue and State in Early Medieval China (400-600)", in which she adopts an affective semiotic framework to examine the meanings generated by Buddhist image-making on three levels: visual-affective, linguistic-emotional, and socio-political. She is interested in understanding how religion, art and emotion interact, and developing methodologies to access the embodied experience of a wider population in the past beyond the educated elites through epigraphical and visual sources. Her broader research interests also cover religious material culture and the role of Buddhism in Chinese economic history.

Teaching Areas:
Buddhism; Chinese religions, culture, and history; Chinese language.

Courses:

• Buddhist Traditions in East Asia (REL/EALC-2718)
• Chinese Religions (REL/EALC-2707)
• Topics in Asian Religions and Culture (REL/EALC-3/4970)
• East Asian Cultural Foundations (EALC-1004)
• Intermediate Chinese (EALC-2200)

Research Interests:

Buddhist material culture; Buddhism and economy; Chinese cultural history; history of emotion.

Publications:

He, Yongshan. "Commoditization of the Sacred: Production and Transaction of Buddhist Statues in Fifth-to tenth-century China." Studies in Chinese Religions 5, no. 2 (2019): 105-121.