PAULINA (PAULA) KOLATA
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Paulina (Paula) Kolata is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is a scholar of religion in Japan, specializing in Buddhism, demographic change, materiality, religious economies, lay-temple networks, and ecologies of practice. Her research combines ethnography, archival work, and creative methodologies, including film, photography, audio, and collaborative research.
She is currently revising her first monograph, Fragile Networks: Buddhist Temple Communities in Depopulating Japan, in response to peer review for the University of Hawai‘i Press. The book examines the networked survival strategies of Buddhist temple communities in regional Japan. Her second book project, on Buddhist material excess, explores the environmental and economic conditions of religious practices in contemporary Japan. It developed from her EU-funded research project, REFUSE, which investigated the ecologies and economies of Buddhist practices within broader issues of waste and consumption.
Before joining Harvard, Professor Kolata was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. She has taught at the University of Copenhagen, Lund University, The University of Manchester, and the University of Chester, offering courses in the anthropology of religion, East and Southeast Asian societies and religion, material religion, Buddhism, and qualitative research methods.
Professor Kolata earned her Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from the University of Manchester (2020), an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (2014), and a B.A. (Hons) in Japanese Studies from the University of Manchester (2011), including research stays at Kyoto University and Hiroshima University.