Buddhism Unit
The Buddhism Unit would like to sponsor a session for the online meeting in June. Any and all topics are welcome. Below are some of the themes that our members have proposed explicitly with a preference for the online 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.
- 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. We are aiming for the online session of AAR in June, in order to facilitate greater engagement from scholars who might not easily travel to Boston in November 2025, in particular those based in India.
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.