Andrew Macomber

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave the plenary talk at the 2025 Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, on October 20. His talk was titled “The Stranger, Corpse Medicine, and Technology: Human Exploitation Folklore in Japan.”

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave the plenary talk at the 2025 Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, on October 20. His talk was titled “The Stranger, Corpse Medicine, and Technology: Human Exploitation Folklore in Japan.”

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published the chapter “Corpses as Pathogenic Agents in Early Medieval Japan” for the book Materialities of Disease Across the Medieval World: Images, Objects, and Remains (Arc Humanities Press, 2025).

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber was awarded a subvention grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies (administered by American Council of Learned Societies) for the publication of his book Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2026).

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published a translation of an article in Japanese for the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, "The Cultural Meaning of Setsuwa: Ono no Takamura’s Journey to Hell and Back."

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published an article for the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, "Disease, Defilement, and the Dead: Buddhist Medicine and the Emergence of Corpse-Vector Disease."

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave a talk at the 2024 Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, on October 23. His talk was titled “A Nascent Zombie Affliction in Medieval Japan: The Buddhist Ritual Response to ‘Corpse-vector Disease.’”

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave a talk as part of the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University on January 19. His presentation was titled “Evil Dead in the Aristocratic Mansion: Buddhist Experiments with Ritual Healing in Heian Japan.”

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published an encyclopedia article, "Buddhism and Medicine in Premodern Japan," for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published two book reviews, one on a Korean deity in Japanese Buddhism for Monumenta Nipponica, and another on Buddhism and medicine in premodern in Japan for Asian Medicine.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave a presentation via Zoom for the international conference, “Religions, Thoughts, and Health in Asia,” held at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca' Foscari, University of Venice, on October 26, 2021. His talk, "Everything Evil in You: Metapersonal Irritants in the Buddhist Immune System," explored the complicated relationship between disease-causing demons and patients in medieval Japan.

Andrew Macomber published a book, Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan, with co-editor C. Pierce Salguero (University of Hawai'i Press, August 2020). He also contributes a chapter to the volume, "Ritualizing Moxibustion in the Early Medieval Tendai-Jimon Lineage," which examines how Buddhists sought to treat "corpse-vector disease," a mysterious illness that began afflicting aristocrats and emperors in the late twelfth century, through a combination of ritual therapeutics and Chinese medicine.

Assistant professor of East Asian religions Andrew Macomber published a chapter in Japanese on aromatics and religious experience in early medieval Japanese Buddhism in the book Yoi no bunkashi: girei kara yamai made 酔いの文化史─儀礼から病まで (The Cultural History of Intoxication: From Ritual to Illness), edited by Itō Nobuhiro, Bensei Shuppan, 2020.