Program Unit In-person November Annual Meeting 2025

Buddhism Unit

Call for Proposals

The Buddhism Unit welcomes proposals for Papers Sessions, Roundtables, and Individual Papers in all areas of the study of Buddhism. To encourage greater exchange among the various subfields within Buddhist Studies, we are particularly interested in sessions that confront enduring problems in the study of Buddhism, raise important theoretical or methodological issues, and/or bring fresh materials or perspectives to bear on themes of broad interest, especially those that address multiple regions and/or time periods. All proposals should demonstrate their coherence and significance in language accessible to the Steering Committee, which includes individuals working on diverse aspects of Buddhism. We are also committed to diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, rank, institutional affiliation, etc. WISAR (http://libblogs.luc.edu/wisar/) is an excellent resource for ensuring gender balance (if you are not listed in WISAR and would like to be, please consider uploading your information).

Although everyone is welcome to submit a proposal for Individual Papers, we are prioritizing contributions by graduate students and/or postdocs. Roughly four Individual Papers will be chosen for an omnibus session entitled “New Work in Buddhist Studies.” Please do not submit a paper as both an Individual Paper Proposal and as part of a Papers Session Proposal.

All AAR sessions are now 90 minutes or 2 hours in length. If you wish, you may indicate which time-length you have in mind for a session, but we cannot guarantee it. Our Unit will be able to sponsor three 2-hour sessions and two 90-minute sessions and we gain an additional 2-hour session with co-sponsorship.

We welcome proposals on this year’s Presidential Theme, "Freedom," or proposals that relate in some way to the location of the Annual Meeting (Boston, Massachusetts). 

Below are some of the other themes that our members have proposed for the meeting, but please also feel free to submit a proposal on topics not represented on this list. If you are interested in contributing to a proposal on one of these topics, please contact the organizer directly.

 

The humanities, religion departments, and Buddhist Studies programs are all under threat as state legislators increasingly cut funding, politicians seek to interfere with liberal arts curricula, and students themselves struggle to grasp their value and relevance. How do we teach Buddhist Studies in this environment? This roundtable seeks participants from diverse perspectives, especially financially vulnerable institutions and/or those in states like Florida in which higher education is under legislative attack, who wish to triage Buddhist Studies pedagogy in 2025.

 

This panel strives to explore the significance of Buddhist materials in the study of Buddhist lives. How do flowers, monastic robes, hair, and amulets, among other materials and objects, shape religious practice and devotion? How does touching objects or smelling them form new relations to the Buddhist path? This panel strives to bring together scholars from diverse methodological, regional, and temporal fields to discuss the centrality of Buddhist materialities and sensorium’s in the study of Buddhism.                                  

 

  • Monastic Lineages: Rebirth, Karma, and Succession (Contact: Nicole Willock, nwillock@odu.edu)

Invites participants on a roundtable with pre-circulated short research papers to explore how succession works in different monastic institutions across varying Buddhist traditions in modern and contemporary period (from 19th century to now) with particular attention to the role of karma and rebirth, or the lack thereof.

 

Scholars of Buddhism increasingly employ highly contextualized readings that analyze Buddhist literature within the tradition and local, geographic context. This panel reverses this trend. It invites comparative approaches that put Buddhist literature in dialogue with other “texts”—including religious literature that emerged outside of Asia as well as non-religious media like film, fiction, and biography—in order to shed new light on Buddhist texts within a global comparative frame. Each paper would pair at least one Buddhist text with at least one non-Buddhist example.

 

Religions are neither static nor homogenous, but dynamic and multifaceted traditions driven by internal and external factors. The panel looks at Śāntideva’s widely acclaimed Bodhicarayāvatāra in relation to the dynamics of tradition. It focuses on three factors: (1) inner-Buddhist doctrinal dynamics, (2) social dynamics, (3) interreligious dynamics. 

 

This possible co-sponsored session invites proposals focused on the sociology of Buddhism, including local or global studies, reflections on the state of the field, and more from scholars working across geographies, traditions, and practices. We seek original research using sociological methodologies, such as quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods,  historical sociology, and theoretical approaches.

 

This roundtable discussion invites scholars in Buddhist Studies to explore areas of rapid transformation as Buddhism intersects with newly emerging practices and phenomena, such as online religion and developments in contemporary science. These and similar developments challenge the traditional norms of Buddhism long dominated by institutional, textual, and ritual frameworks and transcend conventional boundaries. Such interdisciplinary engagements create new opportunities for Buddhism to directly impact modern scientific and secular practices. We will examine the evolving frontiers of Buddhism, both by challenging established norms and by opening new doors for innovation and collaboration in a global context.

 

Recent work in religious ethics has highlighted the importance of thinking in an exemplarist mode – in the words of Alda Balthrop-Lewis, of narrating “what we admire in those we have long admired, in order to make them resonate with contemporary ethical needs.” The mode of narrating with admiration does not preclude critical commentary related to these same persons, but holds suspicious reading together with generosity in interpreting the lives and actions of real people who made the efforts they could, in the directions of possibility open to them.  This panel thus seeks papers interested in narrating what we admire in the lives of Buddhists, past and present, who live(d) and act(ed) with implicit or explicit environmental concerns. In (re)narrating these ethical lives, this panel hopes to forward a set of examples that can inspire personal and social transformation in this crucial moment of climate emergency.

 

We aim to explore the diverse ways in which Buddhist sūtras engage their audiences, including the use of rhetorical devices, affective stimulation, and embodied experiences. Additionally, we intend to incorporate the expertise of scholars specializing not only in various Buddhism but also in the transitions and developments associated with Buddhist thoughts. 

 

  • Adaptation, Incorporation, Conversion: Buddhist Strategies in Response to Transgression and Violence (Contact: Patrick Lambelet, p.lambelet@maitripa.org)

This panel aims to explore ways in which Buddhists have historically responded to elements of transgression in Buddhist doctrines and practices, including the use of violence and sexuality. We seek submissions covering a broad range of Buddhist traditions and methodologies, including textual, historical, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches.

 

Recent research has discussed and documented the possible pitfalls of meditation practice for mental health. However, Buddhist meditation has also been adopted by neurodiverse and disability communities as a means of improving wellbeing and healing. According to emerging research, Buddhist meditation and mindfulness practice often have positive outcomes for neurodiverse and disabled individuals. This panel seeks to facilitate a discussion at the intersection of Buddhist and Disability Studies about experiences of meditation practice by these communities, and propose pathways for further research in this area.

 

This roundtable on Buddhist foodways seeks to illuminate how food is produced, circulated, consumed, and disposed of across Buddhist networks and how, in turn, it enables and disrupts such networks. By focusing on Buddhist foodways and their local and trans-local trajectories, we seek short historically and ethnographically grounded reflections to understand not only how food can work to create spaces for articulation and understanding of religious values, but also how food stimulates and challenges religious practices and discourses, and how it drives processes of marginalization and politicization across contemporary Buddhist contexts.

  • Roundtable: New Works in Modern Indian Buddhisms (Contact: Upayadhi S. Luraschi, upayadhi@uchicago.edu) 

This roundtable seeks to showcase and discuss recent works contributing to our understanding of Buddhist communities and movements in modern India. Attention is more typically granted to the pre-modern period of Indian Buddhism, with the still prevalent idea that the living tradition "all but disappeared" sometime in the 13th century. However, recent publications and scholarship shed new light on the multifacetedness of modern Buddhism in India, particularly from the 1830s and onwards. We invite authors of such works (recently published or soon to be) to share their key findings, as well as to engage with one another on the panel about the state of the field, methodological challenges and future lines of inquiry.

Since the establishment of the first Buddhist museums by British colonial administrators in Bagan, Myanmar (1904), and Sarnath, India (1908), to house archaeological finds, the world has seen an explosion of Buddhist exhibitions and museums. This session seeks to understand this phenomenon in its broadest form—exhibitions, galleries, museumified temples, cultural parks, or temple-museums—and ask what these tell us about the confluence of the modern museological form and an ancient tradition. In what ways do Buddhist museums and exhibitions illustrate the changing attitudes towards the religion? How do these places interpret Buddhism and what impacts do these interpretations have on the beliefs and practices of Buddhism?

Statement of Purpose

This Unit is the largest and most diverse forum for Buddhist studies in North America. We embrace the full historical range of the Buddhist tradition from its inception some two-and-a-half millennia ago to the present and span its entire geographical sweep — the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, and the West. In addition to being historically and geographically inclusive, we have made efforts to encourage methodological plurality. Papers presented in recent years reflect, in addition to the philological and textual approaches of classic Buddhology, the methods of intellectual history, institutional history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, gender and cultural studies, art history, literary theory, and postcolonial studies. We will continue to encourage cross-disciplinary exchange. This Unit is the forum of choice for many established scholars. For some years now, we have also striven to provide a forum for younger scholars to aid them in establishing their careers. Under normal circumstances, at least one session at the Annual Meeting is devoted to four or five individual papers; often many or all of these are from graduate students or younger scholars making their first academic presentation at a national conference. In recent years, a growing number of foreign scholars have come to recognize this Unit as a valuable forum to submit proposals, including scholars whose primary language is not English. We wish to continue to promote communication with scholars abroad and to provide opportunities for younger scholars. Finally, in recent years, the Buddhism Unit has hosted several broader critical conversations about changing methodological approaches in the field of Buddhist Studies. Because it draws diverse scholars from across the field, the Buddhism Unit at the AAR plays a special role in being a forum for conversations about disciplinary formation.

Review Process: Participant names are visible to chairs but anonymous to steering committee members until after final acceptance/rejection