Janine Tasca Anderson Sawada
Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies
After 14 years at the University of Iowa and four prior years at Grinnell College, Janine T. A. Sawada thought she’d spend the rest of her life in Iowa.
She wasn’t looking for a job when she was told of the open position at Brown.
“You can't necessarily control your fate,” Sawada said. “Sometimes things happen serendipitously.”
Sawada, who was a professor of religious studies at Iowa, is excited to teach in a dedicated East Asian studies department.
“There seems to be a lot of promise for growth, development for the field at Brown; not just contentment with the status quo,” she said, “and I'm really happy about being divided into two departments. It allows me to have an outlet for all my training.” That would be history and religion.
Sawada was born in New York but grew up all over Europe and South America, due to the career path of her diplomat father. Her fascination with East Asian religions began as an undergraduate at Reed College.
“I liked the fact that it was so completely different from high western culture,” she said. “I really wanted to know everything about what I didn't know anything about.”
Sawada followed her B.A. in philosophy with a master’s in the history of religion from Harvard Divinity School. Her master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia, where she trained as a historian, are in Japanese and Chinese Religions.
“My interest has always been in the interaction between and among religious traditions,” she said. “I don’t believe in comparisons beyond a very superficial level.”
This fall Sawada will teach a religious studies seminar called “Classics of East Asian Buddhism,” which she said has never been taught at Brown before. “It's an opportunity for students to read the scriptures of Buddhism in English,” she said. “I wanted students to start at that level, with the fundamental texts of a tradition.”
Her fall lecture course, “The Floating World,” is named for the early modern period of Japanese history — the 17th to 19th centuries — so called for the era’s cultural exuberance. “I’ll be introducing students to the most important intellectual and religious ideals, visual arts and music of the time period,” Sawada said.
In the spring, Sawada will teach an introductory course in Japanese religious traditions and a course in East Asian Buddhist literature called “The Karma of Words,” the flip side of the scripture course, Sawada said. “Students can see Buddhist sensibilities expressed in literature and poetry.”