Professor, Religion, Spirituality, and Society
Jonathan Stockdale’s scholarly interests focus on Japanese religion and culture. He is the author of Imagining Exile in Heian Japan: Banishment in Law, Literature, and Cult (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), which examines how Japanese literature and political players treated the notion of banishment after the Japanese Imperial Court adopted exile, rather than capital punishment, to deal with offenders during the Heian period (794–1185 AD). Stockdale’s recent research examines the presence of whale graves, and whale memorials, and the spiritualization of whales in Japanese history and modern memory. Stockdale teaches Introduction to the Study of World Religions; Japanese Religious Traditions; Imagining Religion: Scholars, Theories, and Cases in the Study of Religion; and Japanimals: Knowledge, Power, and Spirituality at the Intersection of Species.