Guest speaker Ben Van Overmeire on “Carnival in the Zen Temple: A Bakhtinian interpretation of Janwillem van de Wetering’s Afterzen.” Ben Van Overmeire is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke Kunshan University. Currently, he is working on a book on how modern autobiographical narratives of Zen life incorporate koan, Zen riddles revolving around seemingly unsolvable questions such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” His work has appeared in Religions, Japan Studies Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Buddhist-Christian Studies, among other journals. Van Overmeire has presented his work at the annual conferences of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). He is a steering member of the Buddhist Pedagogy seminar at AAR, blogs on benvanovermeire.com and tweets @Zenmirrors.