Michaela Mross

PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, 2014
MA, University of Hamburg, Germany, 2007
BM, Berklee College of Music, Boston, USA, 2000

Michaela Mross specializes in Japanese Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on Sōtō Zen, Buddhist rituals, sacred music, as well as manuscript and print culture in premodern Japan. She has written numerous articles on kōshiki 講式 (Buddhist ceremonials) and co-edited a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies on kōshiki. Her first book, Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of Kōshiki in Japanese Sōtō Zen, was published in 2022 in the Kuroda Series of the University of Hawai’i Press. She is currently working on a monograph on Buddhist hymns (eisanka 詠讃歌) and lay Buddhist choirs in contemporary Zen Buddhism. This project will showcase how music played a vital role in the modernization of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism in the last seventy years.