Robert DeCaroli is Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. The author of numerous book chapters and articles, his first book, Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004.  His second book, Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia, which explores the emergence of figural imagery in the earliest Buddhist traditions of South Asia, was published by Washington University Press in 2015. In 2017 he was co-curating for exhibition “Encountering the Buddha” at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.