Michael Willis is a cultural historian based at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He studied at the University of Chicago with J. A. B. van Buitenen and Pramod Chandra, receiving his doctoral degree in 1988. After teaching in New York, he became the curator of the south Asian and Himalayan collections in the Department of Asia at the British Museum in 1994. Between 2014 and 2020, Willis was Corresponding Principal Investigator of Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State, a research project funded by the European Research Council.
Willis's main research interest has been the cultural, political and religious history of India from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries. He has published on inscriptions and temple architecture, notably TheArchaeology of Hindu Ritual (2009), a work that examined the emergence of temple pūjā and the development of temples as land-holding institutions. Willis has also researched the Buddhist history of India and most produced, most recently, a text, translation and analysis of the Testament of Ba in the volume Bringing Buddhism to Tibet (2021), edited by Lewis Doney.
