Winfield presented her work, "Vajrapani in Renaissance Italy? Buddhist Iconography and the Question of Premodern Orientalism."
This summer, Professor of Religious Studies Pamela D. Winfield presented her original research at a major international conference on “Buddhism and Art from Transregional and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.”
The conference was co-sponsored by the Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies (Peking University), The Frogbear ‘Buddhism from the Ground Up’ Project (University of British Columbia), Centre d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires sur le Bouddhisme (CEIB) and Institut National de Langues et Cultures Orientales (INALCO), Paris.
Her paper, “Vajrapani in Renaissance Italy? Buddhist Iconography and the Question of Premodern Orientalism” examined the historical conditions under which classical Hercules imagery developed into the Buddhist dharma protector Vajrapani, who was then reintroduced back into the European cultural sphere in the 16th century.