Dr. Steven Heine is Professor of Religion and History as well as Director of Asian Studies and Associate Director of the School for International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.  He specializes in East Asian and comparative religions, Japanese Buddhism and intellectual history, Buddhist studies, and religion and social sciences. Dr. Heine earned his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. at Temple University. Before coming to FIU, he taught at Pennsylvania State University and directed the East Asian Studies center there. Professor Heine teaches a variety of courses including Modern Asia and Methods in Asian Studies at graduate and undergraduate levels as well as Japanese culture and religion, Zen Buddhism, Ghosts, spirits and folk religions, religions of the Silk Road, and other aspects of Asian society.

Dr. Heine was a Fulbright Senior Researcher in Japan and twice won National Endowment for Humanities Fellowships plus funding from the AAR and AAS. He has conducted research on East Asian religion and society primarily at Tokyo University and Komazawa University in Tokyo. Heine has lectured at these institutions in addition to Brown, Cambridge Columbia, Emory, Florida, Free University, Harvard, Hawaii, London, North Carolina, McGill, Ohio State, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Stanford, Oslo, UCLA, Yale and others. He was chair of the national Japanese Religions Group (1994-2000) and is editor of Japan Studies Review and a book review editor for Japan for Philosophy East and West published by the University of Hawaii Press.

Dr. Heine’s research specialty is medieval East Asian religious studies, especially the transition of Zen Buddhism from China to Japan. He has published over twenty books, including Sacred High City, Sacred Low City: A Tale of Sacred Sites in Two Tokyo Neighborhoods (Oxford); Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up? (Oxford); Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It (Oxford); Opening a Mountain: Kōans of Zen Masters (Oxford), Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in the Fox Kōan (University of Hawaii Press), The Zen Poetry of Dōgen: Verses From the Mountain of Eternal Peace (Dharma Communications), Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition: A Tale of Two Shōbōgenzō Texts (State University of New York Press), Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen (SUNY), and The Zen Canon: Studies of Classic Zen Texts (Oxford).  His book White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goals (Oxford) was by the Harvard Business School, USA Today, and the Washington Post. 

Dr. Heine has received numerous grants and overseen nearly $2 million in external funding from U.S. Department of Education, the Japan Foundation, the Freeman Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education Title VI office for “Asian Globalization and Latin America Project,” and the “South Florida Consortium for Asian Arts and Culture,” among others. He has directed the “JapaNet” teacher training project funded by The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership and directs a branch of the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia. Heine has received grant funding that helped to create five full-time faculty positions, including three in Asian languages, resulting in a vigorous program at FIU.

He is a recipient of the Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Award for a lifetime of achievement in service to the exchanges between Japan and America and contributing to the benefit of Japan-U.S. relations (Spring 2004), the only non-Japanese or Japanese-American among the recipients of the award in the Florida state district.

In 2006, Steven Heine was awarded the Kauffman Entrepreneurship Professors Award in the FIU’s Eugenio Pino and Family Global Entrepreneurship Center housed in the College of Business Administration that will lead to research and a seminar on Asian cultural values in business.

On April 29, 2007 the Government of Japan conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette to Steven Heine. This award is in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the advancement of the study of Japanese culture and the promotion of understanding of Japan.  

 

In fall 2007, FIU featured Dr. Heine as one of a small handful of faculty included in a Miami Herald campaign regarding University excellence. (For more information, click here).

 

In spring 2009, Dr. Heine was appointed Associate Director of the School of International and Public Affairs, an assignment he performs along with his responsibilities as Director of Asian Studies.

 

In 2010, Dr. Heine completed his second two-term stint as a unit chair of the American Academy of Religion, including the chair of the Japanese Religions Group (1994-2000) and the founding co-chair of the Sacred Space in Asia Group (2004-2010).

In 2011, he gave a number of lectures at national and international venues, including several lectures in March at McGill University in connection with the Montreal Zen poetry festival, a panel he organized on sacred sites in Tokyo at the Association for Asian Studies, the Harshbarger Lecture at Penn State, and at a memorial conference for the late William LaFleur at the Univerity of Pennsylvania.  He also oversaw the inception of FIU as the main site of the National Consortium of Teaching About Asia (NCTA) in Florida, and a continuing rise in Asian Studies graduate and undergraduate enrollments and graduation rates.

In fall 2011, the current issue of the Religious Studies Review was dedicated to Dr. Heine's work with two essays by him and one review article about him. Click here to view it.

 

Dr. Heine currently teaches the following courses for Asian Studies graduate students and undergraduate majors in Asian Studies.

 

Methods in Asian Studies (for syllabus go to Current Courses)

This course provides an overview of research methods in the field of Asian studies.  The course focuses on a particular theme relevant to the field of Asian studies.  This theme is used as a model throughout the course that the students can use to apply methods learned and put skills gained into practice.  The course also analyzes different approaches and methods in the field of Asian studies. This area of study demands an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, taking into account the different disciplines involved in the field of Asian studies.  The course covers significant issues coming from qualitative and quantitative perspectives.

 

Modern Asia (for syllabus go to Current Courses)

This course will focus on modernization by evaluating elements such as westernization, industrialization, and the roles of capitalism, communism, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as the impact of post-colonialism and post-modern society in Asia. Its emphasis is on understanding the foundations as well as the breadth and diversity of the history and politics of Asian society in relation to the modern period and modernization, studied from the standpoint of learning various research methods as well as pedagogical techniques and resources.

In addition, he has taught a variety of other courses.  See Courses Taught for complete list of titles.

 

Dr. Heine has published more than 20 books primarily on Japanese religious thought as well as dozens of articles in refereed journals and collections such as Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Journal of Asiatic Studies, among others. Some of his publications include (selected):

Books on Zen Buddhism

• Zen Masters  co-edited (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up? (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theories in Practice, co-edited (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Zen Classics: Formative Texts in the History of Zen Buddhism, co-edited (Oxford University Press, 2005) 
• The Zen Canon: Understanding the Classic Texts, co-edited (Oxford University Press, 2004) 
• The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, co-edited (Oxford University Press, 2000) 
• Opening a Mountain: Koans of the Zen Masters (Oxford University Press, 2004) 
• Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in Fox Koan (University of Hawaii Press, 1999)