Last November I was invited by Oxford University Press to write an article on “Arts of the Tea Ceremony” for their new online publication Oxford Bibliographies Art History. They say “Oxford is committed to supporting the research of those working in the field of Art History worldwide. Oxford Bibliographies does this by helping you to quickly identify the main pathways of research and to determine the relevance and quality of potential resources. Articles published in Oxford Bibliographies combine the best features of an annotated bibliography with a high-level encyclopedia, all with the online-only capabilities of enhanced cross-referencing, full-text searches and direct links to the sources cited. … All articles will be peer-reviewed and the corpus will grow by at least 50 new articles per year. In addition, each article will be networked and linked to online journals, databases, and other digital resources.  Authors have the option to regularly revise and update the article after publication and are welcome to write additional articles if they propose a topic.”

I finally finished the article (the pandemic slowed me down of course as accessing the books and articles I needed to consult, even those in my on-campus office, wasn’t easy)!  It’s gone through peer review and is awaiting final editorial checks.I would like to discuss the process of writing this article which is so different to a typical research article. OUP have strict guidelines for the articles (maximum ten entries per heading, maximum 70 words per citation) and it was a very interesting intellectual exercise to think about how to group material together, which works to choose for a given topic, what to say about a work, and so on. I would also like us to discuss the role of annotated bibliographies in our teaching and research, looking at other examples (like those by Lori Meeks "Buddhism in Japan", “Monasticism in East Asia” and “Feminist Approaches to the Study of Buddhism” in the Oxford Bibliographies Buddhism – note that these links may not work because you have to be signed into the Oxford Bibliographies database through USC Libraries. How can we use these as teaching tools and to help develop syllabi?