Barbara Rossetti Ambros

Biography

Barbara Rossetti Ambros is a professor in East Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research on Japanese Religions has focused on issues in gender studies; human-animal relationships; and place and space.

She has published articles in journals such as Religions, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Monumenta Nipponica, Asian Ethnology, Material Religion, and Asian Cultural Studies. Her monographs include Women in Japanese Religions (New York University Press, 2015), Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), and Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Early Modern Ōyama Cult and Regional Religion (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).

She served as co-chair of the Animals and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion 2014–2021. She served as the co-chair of the Japanese Religions Group at the American Academy of Religion from 2008 to 2014 and as the President for the Study of Japanese Religions from 2008 to 2011. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, UNC’s Institute of Arts and Humanities, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japanese Ministry of Education, and the German Academic Exchange Service.

Before coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, where she presently teaches, she taught at Columbia University in New York and at International Christian University in Tokyo. She holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Civilization and Languages from Harvard University (2002), an MA in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University (1995), and an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (1993).