Julia received her Ph.D. at Harvard University, in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She holds an M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has taught courses at Yale University and Stanford University, where she held postdoctoral fellowships. As a historian of medieval Japan, Julia specializes in religion, death, and the body. Her research focuses on Buddhist manuscripts and art, and she is especially interested in the socioreligious significance of death and the afterlife in Buddhist materials. She is also interested in questions about Buddhist mummification and the reimagining of Chinese and Indian Buddhism(s) in Japan. Julia’s book project, under review with the University of Hawaii Press, is a study of relic worship in medieval Japan. Using interdisciplinary methods from religious studies to art history, it maintains that relic worship was less sectarian than previous scholarship has argued; rather, it often combined relics from various temples and iconography from across the Buddhist pantheon (including from China and India).