Mimi Yiengpruksawan
Yiengpruksawan’s academic interests focus on the art histories of Buddhism in the nonmodern period, primarily in the Japanese context, but also encompassing Eurasian components with emphasis on the Silk Roads network. She takes her cue from the Heian-period statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga, who on presenting his bona fides in 1007, described Japan as a country on the Buddhist continent of Jambudvīpa, that’s to say, as part of a greater Buddhist cosmopolis comprised of many nationalities and ethnicities. In so doing Yiengpruksawan brings a cross-regional and interdisciplinary approach to her work which emphasizes contact and exchange, not isolation, as the engines driving cultural formation, in tandem with stochastic and exogenous interventions including environmental and anthropogenic crisis.