Existential Despair and Living Deliberately
Prof. Justin McDaniel is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Chair of Undergraduate Studies. He is also an associate editor of the peer reviewed Journal of Asian Studies. Justin received his Masters from Harvard Divinity School and an additional MA and his doctorate at Harvard’s department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies where he specialized in southeast Asian Buddhist literature, art and architecture. While serving as a volunteer in a project in Cambodia, Justin became a monk for a while. His publications and his teaching and advising skills have received many awards from Harvard, Ohio University, the University of California and U Penn. In 2012 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Now he is teaching two courses at U Penn that surprisingly have become extremely popular among young students across the campus: Existential Despair and Living Deliberately. He is the author of several books including “The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk”, and more recently a scholarly work “Architects of Buddhist Leisure”.