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As Southeast Community College’s resident expert in Buddhist Studies, Dr. Courtney Bruntz recently wrote a chapter in the newly-published Buddhism Under Capitalism, an academic book published on Nov. 3, 2022.

“I am a scholar of Buddhist Studies, specifically contemporary Chinese Buddhism, and I am particularly interested in how Buddhist practice is shaped by socioeconomic contexts, plus how Buddhists are agentive in altering their surrounding societies,” Bruntz explained.

Bruntz is an Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences at SCC with an extensive background in Asian Studies. During college, she studied abroad in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies in Speech Communications, she went on to earn a master’s degree in Cultural and Historical Studies of Religion, and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies.

In her contributing chapter in Buddhism Under Capitalism, she focuses on the research between religious traditions being entrenched in their surrounding socioeconomic and cultural settings. The book has 11 chapters with 15 different authors.

“For this particular project, I revealed the ways that Buddhists are contributing to technological advancements in China and Japan and how they are making use of robots and artificial intelligence to meet the needs of practitioners.”

This work is the result of an academic seminar titled “Economics and Capitalism in the Study of Buddhism,” which ran annually from 2015 to 2019 at the American Academy of Religion meeting. From presentations at this seminar, scholars edited their work to produce this volume, which was proposed to Bloomsbury for publication. 

Prior to this, Dr. Bruntz published Buddhist Tourism in Asia in 2020. Coming up next, she is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Lived Buddhism, which will be published in 2024.

Her current publication can be found at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/buddhism-under-capitalism-9781350228337/

For more on Dr. Courtney Bruntz, see her bio.