Maya Stiller

Maya Stiller works on the premise that religion has a budget, a labor force, and a donor list, and she is interested in what those records reveal that doctrine does not. Her research asks who paid for Korea’s Buddhist temples, who carved and painted them, what people did once they arrived, and why the categories we inherit (Buddhist, Daoist, shamanic, Confucian) dissolve on close contact with the evidence. She works mainly on Korea between roughly 1200 and 1900, and keeps finding that the interesting things happened at the edges rather than the centers.

She is currently Associate Professor of Korean Art and Visual Culture and Director of Undergraduate Studies in KU’s Department of Art History. She holds a Dr. phil. in East Asian art history from the Freie Universität Berlin and a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from UCLA. She grew up in Berlin, the daughter of a Korean mother and a German father, and studied and worked in Europe and East Asia before completing the second doctorate in Los Angeles. She researches and lectures in Korean, Japanese, German, French, and English, and reads literary Sinitic, which means she can work directly from a temple’s hanmun donor inscriptions, the Japanese colonial survey reports that photographed the temple a century ago, and the German and French Buddhological literature, most of which has never been translated.

Her first book, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan: Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea (University of Washington Press, 2021), began from the observation that for four centuries, aristocratic men climbed the country’s most sacred mountain and carved their names into it. The book won the American Historical Association’s Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize and an honorable mention for the Association for Asian Studies’ James B. Palais Prize.

Her current book, Sensing the Buddha Land: Architecture, Murals, and Sound in Late Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2027), reconstructs the temple hall as a sensory environment rather than a container for objects. Alongside it she is at work on a co-authored history of Korean Buddhism and on articles concerning artisanal labor, monastic economies, and the material evidence of political loyalty. Recent essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Artibus Asiae, the Journal of Asian Studies, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, and the Journal of Korean Religions. Two digital projects, the Autographic Atlas of Korea and an ongoing VR study of temple murals, extend this research into spatial and computational methods. Her work has been supported by the ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Korea Foundation, and, in 2026-27, a senior fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). 

Teaching: Professor Stiller teaches across the full range of Korean and East Asian visual culture, from Buddhist art and ceramics to modern and contemporary Korean art. Her lecture course on Korean Buddhist art treats objects as things that did work: relics functioned as amulets, depictions of hell enforced moral conduct, and ritual paintings consoled the grieving. Her graduate seminars pair close work with objects at the Spencer Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum with training in digital and spatial methods, and she regularly brings in guest lecturers from across North America, Europe, and Korea.

For prospective graduate students: Professor Stiller welcomes inquiries from students working on Korean art and visual culture, and from students in Buddhist studies, religious studies, architectural history, and East Asian studies whose questions overlap with hers: religious economies and patronage, artisans and labor, pilgrimage and sacred landscape, the interaction of Buddhism with shamanic and Daoist practice, or digital and spatial approaches to any of these. Her current advisees work on subjects ranging from eighteenth-century construction and ecology to image-text media under the U.S. Army Military Government. She is less concerned with what period or topic a student works on than with how they work: whether they are drawn to primary sources and material evidence, to the economic, environmental, and social conditions behind an object, and to questions that cut across multiple disciplines.

Competitive applicants come with prior training in Korean studies, art history, or a cognate field, and with Korean sufficient to read secondary scholarship, or close to it. Those intending to work on premodern material should also have begun, or be ready to begin immediately, on literary Sinitic (hanmun). 

Professor Stiller was the first in her family to attend graduate school and knows that much of what determines success in a doctoral program is never written down. If something about the application process is unclear, ask her rather than guessing. Students from first-generation, immigrant, and non-traditional backgrounds are particularly encouraged to apply. Interested applicants should email her beforehand with a paragraph about the question they cannot stop thinking about, and a sentence on where their languages currently stand.