Lan Li received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from McMaster University in 2024, specializing in Buddhism and East Asian religions. She is a lecturer in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she teaches courses on Global Buddhism. Trained in both religious studies and archaeology, her research investigates donative epigraphy and Buddhist patronage in medieval China, as well as the relationships among funerary practices, gender, and family in Chinese religions. Her ongoing project focuses on stone inscriptions and archaeological sites in Luoyang, reconstructing the religious and social lives of Buddhist practitioners and the evolving history of Chinese Buddhism during the Tang dynasty.
Lan received her M.A. in Archaeology from Peking University in 2010 and subsequently worked for eight years as an archaeologist at Buddhist sites in China, particularly the Longmen Grottoes. She was also a BDK-funded visiting student at Kyoto University from 2023 to 2024. She has published peer-reviewed papers and presented her research at many international conferences and workshops, and now serves as a co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies (CJBS).
In October 2025, she presented her research on Virtual Reality and the Longmen Grottoes at two events sponsored by the Ho Centre. The first was a lunch-time “Conversation with an Archaeologist” event for graduate students and faculty, and the second was an evening lecture co-sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America Toronto Society.
