Merijn ter Haar is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in medieval Chinese religious history, particularly the entangled development of Buddhist and Daoist traditions. He holds a master’s degree in Transcultural Studies from Heidelberg University and dual bachelor’s degrees in Chinese and Japanese Studies from Leiden University. His training in East Asian languages and cultures was further enriched by a semester at Nagasaki University, a year at National Taiwan Normal University, and a summer at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama.
His research approach is interdisciplinary and integrates perspectives from transcultural studies to deconstruct essentializing notions of culture and religion. It aims to tease apart how traditions are (trans)formed, maintained, and contested. His proposed dissertation project situates a set of Daoist scriptures from the 6th and 7th centuries in a broader discourse that spanned across the different teachings, inviting us to reconsider how relations and boundaries were drawn in the medieval Chinese intellectual landscape. Moving beyond simplistic notions of borrowing and influence, the project explores how people creatively drew on the cultural repertoire(s) available to them to develop a shared language through which to discuss common concerns.