Biography
Jiayi Zhu is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Buddhist art, architecture, and material culture in medieval China and their connections across East Asia. Drawing on textual, visual, material, and spatial sources, she examines how religious practices transformed natural and built environments and how those environments, in turn, shaped Buddhist life, regional identities, and urban landscapes. Her dissertation, A Buddha Land for All: Consolidating Sacred Space in Hangzhou during the Wuyue Kingdom (907–978), investigates how rulers, monastics, and lay communities transformed tenth-century Hangzhou into a distinctively Buddhist capital through ritual practices and material interventions across the city’s streets, mountains, rivers, and lakes.