Carolyn Wargula

Carolyn Wargula is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Bucknell University specializing in Japanese Buddhist art. At Yale, she will write her forthcoming book project, Embodied Embroideries: Gender, Agency, and the Body in Japanese Buddhism, which examines the mortuary practice of hair embroidery from the late twelfth- to the seventeenth centuries. She considers how this medium appealed particularly to women as a means to achieve enlightenment and to circumnavigate doctrinal teachings concerning the impurities of the female body. 

Carolyn was born in Japan and grew up in Okinawa and Sendai before moving to the United States at the age of sixteen. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and conducted archival research at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies as a Japan Foundation Fellow. Prior to Yale, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College.