Dr. Daniela Campo, 2014
Curriculum Vitae
Daniela Campo is an historian and a sinologist. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the MPI-MMG Department of Religious Diversity. In 2011, she has received a PhD in East Asian Studies, 'History of Religions' program, from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris. Her doctoral research has focused on the connections between hagiography and the formation of religious leadership, while at the same time exploring how Chinese Buddhist communities lived in modern times and reacted to political and social changes. Since 2011, she has been a post-doctoral fellow in the 'Religions and societies in Asia' program of the GSRL (‘Societies, Religions, Secularisms Institute’, UMR EPHE-CNRS) in Paris.
Her research explored the reconfiguration of the relationship between religion, state, and society in China between the end of the empire and the beginning of the Maoist period. Her project focused, on one side, on the way Chinese Buddhism transformed and evolved in the new political and ideological context of the Republican era, under the direction of Buddhist monastic elites belonging to different schools and trends, and thanks to intense transnational exchanges with other Buddhist countries in Asia. On the other side, the project analysed the religious engagement of Chinese Buddhist laity belonging to urban modernizing elites, and the role they played as a mediating force between Buddhism and the Nation-State in the first half of the twentieth century.
Research themes: Buddhist monastic elites, lineages, engaged lay elites, networks, social welfare; institutional Buddhism; Chinese monastic discipline; exchanges between Chinese and Japanese Buddhism; Buddhist nationalism; religion and the Nation-state; Chinese modernity.