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Mariangela Carpinteri is a Ph.D. Candidate in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Visiting Researcher at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo. Her research lies at the intersection of Ritual Studies, Religion and Nature, and the history of East Asian religions. Her current work examines the historical development of the Ōharae, one of Japan’s most important purification rituals. Through the study of ritual texts, material culture, and religious practice from the classical period to the present, she investigates changing understandings of purification, pollution, and the relationship between humans and the natural world. Her dissertation explores how the Ōharae has been adapted across different historical contexts while continuing to shape religious conceptions of landscape, environment, and communal well-being. More broadly, her research focuses on the interactions between religion and the environment in East Asia, with particular attention to Japanese and Chinese religious traditions. She is interested in how ritual practices, cosmological ideas, and conceptions of nature have informed human engagements with mountains, forests, rivers, and the sea. Her earlier work examined the emergence and development of environmental Buddhism and contemporary Buddhist responses to ecological issues. Her additional research interests include Tokugawa-period religious culture, Shintō and Buddhism, Confucian thought in China and Japan, and the role of ritual in shaping religious experience and environmental imagination.