Associate Professor of Hindu Studies, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Graduate Program in Global Studies, Sophia University

Biography:

Dr. Kiyokazu Okita is Associate Professor of Hindu Studies at Faculty of Liberal Arts and at Graduate Program in Global Studies, Sophia University, Tokyo. He is also a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He is the author of Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2014) as well as the editor of The Building of Vṛndāvana (Brill, 2024. Co-edited with Dr. Rembert Lutjeharms). He has published articles in various academic journals such as Journal of Indian Philosophy, International Journal of Hindu Studies, and Journal of Vaishnava Studies. In his current research project, The Aesthetic Theories of Devotion in Late Medieval South Asia funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion Science (2023-27), Okita traces a history of devotional aesthetic sentiment (bhakti-rasa) that emerged after the tenth century.

Edited volume:

• 2024, (Co-edited with Rembert Lutjeharms) The Building of Vṛndāvana: Architecture, Theology, and Practice in an Early Modern Pilgrimage Town, Brill’s Indological Library, Vol. 57 (Leiden: Brill)

Journal articles:

• 2021, “A Genealogy of Divine Paramour: Rūpa Gosvāmī’ Ujjvalanīlamaṇi in the History of Sanskrit Dramaturgy and Literary Criticism”, Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 30: 1, 225-244.
• 2021, “The Theology of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava Sampradāya: Six Distinctive Features”, Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 29: 2, 5-24.
• 2021, “Śleṣa Readings on Bhāgavatapurāṇa 1.1.1: Śrīnātha Cakravartī’s Caitanyamatamañjuṣā Commentary”, The Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies, 69: 3, 979-985.
• 2020, “Rejecting Monism: Dvaita Vedānta’s Engagement with the Bhāgavatapurāṇa”, Journal of Indian Philosophy, 48: 3, 447-465.
• 2020, “The Authorship of the Commentary on Vopadeva’s Harilīlā”, The Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies, 68: 3, 1107-1113.
• 2019, “Bitextuality in Bhāgavata Purāṇa X.29”, The Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies, 66: 3, 1043-1048.
• 2018, “Ethics and Aesthetics in Early Modern South Asia: A Controversy surrounding the Bhāgavata Purāṇa Book X”, International Journal of Hindu Studies, Special Issue, Translating the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, ed. by Anand Mishra and Monika Horstmann, 22: 1, 25-43.

Book chapters:

• 2020, “Divine Transgression: Devotion and Ethics in Bengali Vaiṣṇavism”, The Legacy of Vaisnavism in Colonial Bengal ed. by Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella (Oxford: Routledge), pp. 212-232.
• 2019, “Singing in Protest: Early Modern Hindu-Muslim Encounters in Bengali Hagiographies of Chaitanya”, Bhakti and Power: Debating India’s Religion of the Heart ed. by John Stratton Hawley, Swapna Sharma, and Christian Lee Novetzke (Seattle: The University of Washington Press), pp. 159-170.