Mark J. Teeuwen is a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 academic and Japanologist. He is an expert in Japanese religious practices, and he is a Professor at the University of Oslo

University of Oslo

The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...

. In a 2002 essay called From Jindō to Shinto: A Concept Takes Shape, he traced the evolution of the term "Shinto" from the reconstructed pronunciation Jindō at the time of the Nihon Shoki

Nihon Shoki

The , sometimes translated as The Chronicles of Japan, is the second oldest book of classical Japanese history. It is more elaborate and detailed than the Kojiki, the oldest, and has proven to be an important tool for historians and archaeologists as it includes the most complete extant historical...

 until today, describing the changes its meaning has gone through.

Early life

Teeuwen was awarded his MA at the University of Leiden in 1989. His earned a Ph.D. at Leiden in 1996.

Career

From 1994 through 1999, Teeuwen was a Lecturer at the Japanese Studies Centre, University of Wales

University of Wales

The University of Wales was a confederal university founded in 1893. It had accredited institutions throughout Wales, and formerly accredited courses in Britain and abroad, with over 100,000 students, but in October 2011, after a number of scandals, it withdrew all accreditation, and it was...

 in Cardiff

Cardiff

Cardiff is the capital, largest city and most populous county of Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for...

. Since 1999, he has been Professor of Japanese at the University of Oslo.

Teeuwen's critical examination of religious practices in Japan is considered ground-breaking. His published work has been informed by his historical research. Historicity

Historicity

Historicity may mean:*the quality of being part of recorded history, as opposed to prehistory*the quality of being part of history as opposed to being a historical myth or legend, for example:** Historicity of the Iliad**Historicity...

 is construed as a fundamental component of Teeuwen's view of Shinto.

Teeuwen's work is influenced by the writings of Toshio Kuroda

Toshio Kuroda

was a Japanese academic, historian and university professor. A specialist in medieval Japanese history and in the history of Japanese thought, he greatly influenced Japanese historiography with several innovative and controversial theories. His ideas were the opposite of what mainstream academics...

.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Mark Teeuwen, OCLC

OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

/WorldCat

WorldCat

WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

 encompasses roughly 20 works in 60+ publications in 5 languages and 2,000+ library holdings .

• Watarai Shintô: an Intellectual History of the Outer Shrine in Ise (1996)
• Nakatomi Harae Kunge: Purification and Enlightenment in Late-Heian Japan (1998)
• Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (1999), with John Breen
  John Breen (scholar)
  John Lawrence Breen is a British academic and Japanologist. He is a specialist in Japanese religious practices at the in Kyoto. He collaborates with Dutch scholar Mark Teeuwen, with whom he has published two books....
  
  
• Buddhas and Kami in Japan 'honji suijaku' as a Combinatory Paradigm (2002)
• Tracing Shinto in the History of Kami Worship (2002), with Bernhard Scheid
  Bernhard Scheid
  Bernhard Scheid is an Austrian historian, academic and Japanologist on the faculty of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna ....
  
  
• Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm (2002)
• Tracing Shinto in the History of Kami Workshop (2002)
• Shinto, a Short History (2003)
• Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honki Suijaku as Combinatory Paradigm (2003), with Fabio Rambelli
  Fabio Rambelli
  Fabio Rambelli is an Italian academic, author and editor. He is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara .-Early life:...
  
  
• Shinto: een geschiedenis van Japanse goden en heiligdommen (2004)
• The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion (2006)
• A New History of Shinto (2010), with John Breen

Articles

• "Comparative perspectives on the emergence of jindō and Shinto," Bulletin of SOAS, Vol. 70, No. 2, 2007, pp. 373-402.
• "Kokugaku vs. Nativism," onumenta Nipponica 61-2, Summer 2006, pp. 227-24.