Biography
Zhenru Zhou is a PhD student studying East Asian art and architecture. Her interests include East Asian visual culture, medieval religious architecture, and cultural exchange along the Silk Road. Before coming to the University of Chicago, she received her MA in architecture respectively from Princeton University in 2016 and Tsinghua University in 2014 and her BA from Tsinghua in 2011. Her MA thesis focuses on representations of the Buddhist West Pure Land, entitled “Recarving the Dunhuang Grottoes: a study on the roles of architecture in the process of copying Buddhist Pure Land landscapes.” She also interned at Dunhuang Academy and Tsinghua Architecture Design Institute.