Professor Starling’s research is on Buddhism as lived in early modern, modern, and contemporary Japan, with a focus on the Jōdo Shinshū and special attention to themes such as gender, family, ethics, emotion and illness.
A recently published article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion called “Audience, Authorship, and Agency: Religious Educational Materials for Modern Buddhist Women’s Groups in Japan,” is about Buddhist laywomen’s groups in modern Japan. Her analysis highlights the dynamics of the production of doctrinal materials by male monks in response to the voracious demand of these well-educated and well-organized women’s groups, and suggests that in the absence of female-authored texts, audienceship and readership might be considered as important agentive actions by female adherents.
A second research project engages ethnographic fieldwork to understand contemporary Buddhist responses to stigma, discrimination, and precarity. Starling profiles Buddhist volunteers who have taken up the cause of leprosy (also known as Hansen’s Disease) awareness and advocacy, working both inside and outside of Buddhist institutions to redress the past and current suffering of Hansen’s Disease patients. She also has an interest in religious and secular spaces, exploring Buddhist temples themselves as spaces that defy the public-private binary in illuminating ways.
Starling’s past scholarly articles have appeared in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Eastern Buddhist, Religion Compass, and the Journal of Global Buddhism. Her first monograph, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in the Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), is an ethnography of temple wives in the True Pure Land Buddhist School (Jōdo Shinshū). She has received numerous fellowships in support of her research, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Japan Foundation, and the American Association of University Women.
