Stephen Covell
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Stephen Covell received his Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 2001. He lived in Japan for ten years where he studied the Japanese language (Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama), conducted fieldwork in Buddhist temples, conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo University, and as a research associate at Taisho University, and International Christian University. He has also lectured, taught English (on the Japanese Ministry of Education’s JET program), and worked as a translator in Japan. He was awarded a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship, a Japan Foundation fellowship, the Crown Prince Akihito scholarship, the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship, a Center for the Study of Religion Fellowship, and others. His current writing projects include moral and religious education in contemporary Japan, a textbook on death and dying in Asia, and a biography of the Tendai priest Yamada Etai. His publications include Stephen G. Covell, Japanese Temple Buddhism, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005) and Stephen G. Covell and Mark Rowe, eds., Traditional Buddhism in Contemporary Japan, special edition of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (2004). He teaches courses on Japanese religion, religion and education, death and dying, pedagogy, and religion and ethics.