From October 2024, Martin Blahota will work on the MSCA CZ Project "Nomadic Spirituality: Unstable Buddhist Identities in East Asian Borderlands" at Heidelberg University.
This research project builds a new understanding of the political and literary history of East Asian borderlands in the first half of the 20th century by focusing on the spiritual dimension of identities in relation to borders. Bridging Japanese and Chinese studies and drawing on cultural, postcolonial, and border studies, this project is centred around the concept of nomadic spirituality – that is, the open spiritual affiliation of individuals whose faiths fluctuate between the religious and the secular during their lives, as opposed to maintaining a single religious faith. The project examines prominent Chinese/Taiwanese writers/intellectuals, who are dominantly associated with the left-wing and secular literary scene.
The main goal is to demonstrate that at specific stages of their literary careers, their writings engaged with Buddhist concepts, which they used for various purposes, both personal and social.
For more information about the project, please click here.
This project is funded by the MSCA Fellowships CZ program.
