Brian Bocking

Brian Bocking was born in North London, studied religions at Lancaster University and took his MA and PhD at Leeds. He taught in the universities of Stirling (Scotland), Tsukuba (Japan), Bath Spa (UK) and was from 1999-2007 Professor of the Study of Religions at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Appointed Professor of the Study of Religions and Head of the new Study of Religions Department at University College Cork, Ireland in 2008 he was founding Secretary of the ISASR, the Irish Association for the Academic Study of Religions and successively Publications Officer and Treasurer of the IAHR (International Association for the History of Religions). He retired in 2015. He has written on Japanese religions, Buddhism, Shinto, New Religions, digital humanities research, religious experience, schools Religious Education and the Study of Religions as taught in universities. His books include the first English translation of the 5th century Chinese text of Nagarjuna's Middle Treatise (1995); a Dictionary of Shinto (1996) and a study of the Japanese religious scroll known as 'The Oracles of the Three Shrines' (Sanja Takusen) (2000). From 2009 he researched with Alicia Turner (Toronto) and Laurence Cox (Maynooth), the life of the forgotten 'Irish Buddhist' U Dhammaloka (?1856-?1914), a pioneer Western Buddhist monk celebrated throughout S/E Asia in the early 1900s (now published as The Irish Buddhist: the Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire, OUP:2020), and with Laurence Cox and Yoshinaga Shin'ichi the life of the Irish Japanologist and pioneer London Buddhist missionary Charles J W Pfoundes (1840-1907 - see http://hdl.handle.net/10468/9812 ). Recent co-edited publications include Religious Education in a Global-Local World (Springer: 2016), with Jenny Berglund and Yafa Shanneik) and, with Christopher Shackle, the 2017 JISASR special issue Representing Sikhism: Essays in Memory of the Irish scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe - free online at https://jisasr.org/archive/current-issue-volume-4-2017/