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About Daigengna Duoer

Daigengna Duoer (pronounced “dye-gain-na” “door“; she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping the history of transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Daigengna is a host for the New Books in East Asian Studies Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. She is also the Editor-in-chief for the Digital Orientalist, an online magazine on digital humanities.

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping the history of transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

Daigengna's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Daigengna:

East Asian Studies October 21, 2022

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan

Sabine Frühstück

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press 2022) is a new addition to a list of publications by Sabine Fruhstuck, one of the leading scholars in the world …
East Asian Studies April 13, 2022

Conflicting Memories

Tibetan History Under Mao Retold: Essays and Primary Documents

Robert Barnett, Benno Weiner, and Françoise Robin

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, history under him was retold: for example, the Cultural Revolution was rebranded as “Ten Years of Chaos” and its policies were deemed …
East Asian Studies March 24, 2022

Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China

Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom

Tao Jiang

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
When we think of pre-Buddhism Chinese philosophy, ideas such as filial piety and “the Dao” might come to mind. But what was at stake in the philosophical debates of early …
East Asian Studies February 14, 2022

A Timely Message from the Cave

The Mahāmudrā and Intellectual Agenda of DGe-bshes Brag-phug-pa DGe-’dun-rin-chen (1926–1997), the Sixty-Ninth RJe-mkhan-po of Bhutan

Dagmar Schwerk

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Following the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism in the second half of the twentieth century, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist teachings such as Mahāmudrā have become increasingly popular around the world. Drawn by teachings …
East Asian Studies November 17, 2021

Lineages of the Literary

Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China

Nicole Willock

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959 …
East Asian Studies October 19, 2021

In the Forest of the Blind

The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms

Matthew W. King

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
What would an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational …
East Asian Studies April 26, 2021

Defining Shugendo

Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion

Andrea Castiglioni, Fabio Rambelli, and Carina Roth

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Andrea Castiglioni, Fabio Rambelli and Carina Roth's edited volume Defining Shugendo: Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion (Bloomsbury, 2020) presents the newest studies on Shugendō-related practices and traditions from both Japanese and …
East Asian Studies April 23, 2021

A Monastery on the Move

Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia

Uranchimeg Tsultemin

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
How, and why did a ger (yurt) develop into the largest and most important monastery in Mongolia, and how did it support the authority of its main resident, the Jebtsundampa …
East Asian Studies April 22, 2021

Building a Religious Empire

Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa

Brenton Sullivan

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
How did Geluk Buddhism become the most widespread school of Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Asia and beyond? In Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa (University …
East Asian Studies April 21, 2021

Into the Field

Human Scientists of Transwar Japan

Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
How did Japanese academics study their "fields" in places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the transwar decades? How did they transform in the postwar, under the US Occupation, and …
East Asian Studies March 24, 2021

Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921-1948)

Simon Wickhamsmith

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
How does revolution literature help to engage Mongolia’s nomadic population with the utopia of a “new society” promised by the Mongolian People’s Revolution Party? In Politics and Literature in Mongolia …
East Asian Studies March 22, 2021

Beyond Pan-Asianism

Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s

Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
What were the stories of modern China-India relations in the age of empires? How did India and China engage with each other beyond pan-Asianist and anti-colonialist interactions? In Beyond Pan-Asianism …
East Asian Studies March 8, 2021

Ishikawa Sanshiro's Geographical Imagination

Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Nadine Willems

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956) was a journalist, intellectual, and self-proclaimed socialist active in early twentieth-century Japan. In Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imaginations: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century …
East Asian Studies February 26, 2021

The Sea and the Sacred in Japan

Aspects of Maritime Religion

Fabio Rambelli

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
In The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion (Bloomsbury 2018), Fabio Rambelli invites various fifteen scholars of Japanese religions to reflect on a well taken-for-granted fact: although the sea …
East Asian Studies February 24, 2021

Buddhism after Mao

Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions

Zhe Ji, Gareth Fisher, André Laliberté

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
With over 100 million followers, Buddhism in the People's Republic of China now fosters the largest community in the world of individuals who self-identify as Buddhists. Although Buddhism was harshly persecuted …
East Asian Studies January 29, 2021

Medicine and Memory in Tibet

Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform

Theresia Hofer

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform (University of Washington Press, 2018) is the first full-length ethnography of Tibetan medical practitioners (amchi) in central Tibet working outside …
East Asian Studies January 25, 2021

Constructing Empire

The Japanese in Changchun, 1905–45

Bill Sewell

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do …
East Asian Studies December 22, 2020

Buddhist Tourism in Asia

Courtney Bruntz and Brooke Schedneck

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
This edited volume is the first book-length study of Buddhist tourism in contemporary Asia in the English language. Featuring chapters from diverse contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history, Buddhist …
East Asian Studies December 9, 2020

Monks in Motion

Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea

Jack Meng-Tat Chia

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford University Press 2020) is the first monograph in the English language to explore the transnationally connected history of …
East Asian Studies December 8, 2020

China's Good War

How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

Rana Mitter

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since …
East Asian Studies October 28, 2020

Jesus Loves Japan

Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora

Suma Ikeuchi

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
In 1990, the Japanese government introduced the Nikkei-jin (Japanese descendant) visa and since then it has attracted more than 190,000 Nikkei Brazilian nationals to Japan. In Jesus Loves Japan: Return …
East Asian Studies September 28, 2020

Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan

Fabio Rambelli

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From …
East Asian Studies September 24, 2020

Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese

Mediation and Superscription of the Tibetan Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Society

Joshua Esler

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
While Tibetan Buddhism continues to face restrictions and challenges imposed by the state in contemporary China, it has in fact entered mainstream Chinese society with a growing middle-class and even …
East Asian Studies September 17, 2020

The Fabric of Indigeneity

Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan

Ann-elise Lewallen

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on Ainu identity and settler …