Duncan Ryuken Williams was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest at Kotakuji Temple (Nagano, Japan) in 1993. He served as a Buddhist chaplain at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2000. Currently, he serves as a priest at Zenshuji Soto Mission in Los Angeles and Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. Previously, he held the Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley and served as the Director of Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies. Williams is the author of the LA Times bestseller “American Sutra” (Harvard University Press, 2019) about Buddhism and the WWII Japanese American internment; “The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan” (Princeton University Press, 2005), and editor of 7 books including “American Buddhism” and “Buddhism and Ecology”. He is on the boards of Tricycle Magazine and the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) and a co-founder of May We Gather, an Asian American Buddhist collective. His most recent project is the building of the Irei Names Monument, a memorial to honor those of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated in America’s internment and concentration camps during WWII.
