Kenneth Kraft

Kenneth Kraft, professor of religious studies at Lehigh University, is a scholar of Japanese Zen and socially engaged Buddhism. At Lehigh he has served as chair of the Religion Studies department and as director of the College Seminar Program. In 2005, he received a Lindback Foundation Award for distinguished teaching from a senior member of the faculty. Kraft has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the Stanford University Japan Center in Kyoto. In 1984–85, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

Kraft’s service on advisory boards has included The Buddhism Project: Art, Buddhism, and Contemporary Culture (New York); Buddhist Peace Fellowship (Berkeley, California); Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale University); Journal of Buddhist Ethics; Religion Working Group on Genetically Modified Organisms (University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics); Rochester Zen Center (Rochester, New York); and World Faiths Development Dialogue (World Bank).

Kraft holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, an MA in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan, and a BA from Harvard University.