Michelle C. Wang 王慧蘭 is a specialist in the Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, primarily of the 6th-10th centuries. Her first book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) examines Buddhist mandalas of the 8th-10th centuries at the Mogao and Yulin Buddhist cave shrines in northwestern China. As the first scholarly monograph on Buddhist mandalas in China, this book considers the religious, cultural, and architectural contexts in which they appeared. In addition to her research on mandalas, she has also written about art and ritual, miracle tales of animated statues, the transcultural reception of Buddhist motifs, Buddhist materiality, and text and image. She co-organized the 2014-2015 Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar "Critical Silk Road Studies" and co-directed the Luce Foundation-funded Georgetown-International Dunhuang Project for North American Silk Road Collections in 2016-2017, which continued in 2020-2022 with support from the Dunhuang Foundation. She is one of the founding board members of the Association for Chinese Art History (https://acah.info/) and faculty PI for the open access resource Digital Index of Dunhuang Art (https://dunhuang.georgetown.domains/).
Professor Wang serves on the Council of the Medieval Academy of America, the Board of Directors of the International Center of Medieval Art, and the editorial board of Archives of Asian Art. Her research and publications have been supported by fellowships and grants from the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, the Li Ching Foundation, the T'ang Studies Society, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Pittsburgh Foundation. Her current book project, tentatively titled Desert Ruins, Colonial Exploration, and the Silk Road Imaginaire, examines the reception of medieval silk road sites in the photographs of explorer Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) and their intersections with colonial discourses of climate change, linguistics, and ethnography.