In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper explores Śivasvāmin’s 9th century Sanskrit poem, the Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), as a case study in novel literary representations of the Buddha generated through Hindu-Buddhist literary encounters in Kashmir. Specifically, it investigates how the poet’s uptake of a specific poetic structure, a description of a mountain, is used to aid his telling of an avadāna narrative in a courtly poetic (mahākāvya) form. It argues that the poem’s description of the mountain creates an extended comparison between the mountain and the Buddha through the literary devices of pun (śleṣa) and suggestion (dhvani). Thus, what appears to be merely the fulfillment of a generic staple of the courtly poetic genre, is in fact an opportunity to explore the nature of Buddhahood and devotion to the Buddha. Overall, this paper illustrates how literary innovations in early medieval Kashmir produced strikingly new representations of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.  

Newar Buddhism, a unique tradition in Nepal, has remained a living tradition while Buddhism in  other parts of South Asia declined after the 15th century. This paper examines the survival of Newar  Buddhism, with a focus on the financial support and patronage it received through donation  inscriptions from the Malla era (1201–1779). The key questions explored are: Who were the  patrons of Newar Buddhism in terms of caste and occupation? How were resources allocated? And  how did Nepal’s patronage system differ from other part of South Asia? 

I argue that, alongside royal patronage, the continuous donations from ordinary lay Buddhists were  vital to the survival of Newar Buddhism. By analyzing medieval patronage patterns, this study sheds light on Newar Buddhism’s creative strategies for sustaining community support. It  contributes to the broader understanding of Buddhist economics, religious sustainability, and the  dynamic interactions between Buddhism and surrounding religious traditions in South Asia.

This paper examines how Mount Jizu in Dali, incorporated into the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in 1371, came to be identified with the Indian mountain Kukkuṭapāda, where the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa is believed to guard Śākyamuni’s robe while awaiting the future Buddha Maitreya. I argue that local elites, Ming state, and Chinese Buddhists collectively produced a new frontier sacred site. Dali elites sought to enhance ethnic prestige by linking their homeland to the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism, while the Ming state promoted Buddhist institutions as part of its broader effort to culturally integrate the southwestern frontier. At the same time, identifying Mount Jizu with Kukkuṭapāda allowed Chinese Buddhists to address a longstanding “borderland complex” arising from Buddhism’s Indian origins by situating the residence of the first Chan patriarch Mahākāśyapa within Ming territory. The case demonstrates how frontier regions could generate new sacred geographies that reshaped the wider Buddhist world.

This paper examines a purported “borderland Buddhism” along Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor, a trans-Himalayan conduit for trade, transportation, and religious exchange between Tibet and South Asia since the seventh century. Focusing on the hermitage of Drakar Taso and its nineteenth-century abbot Chokyi Wangchuk (1775–1837), the paper develops the concept of the “frontier lama”—a religious exemplar whose authority and institutional practice are constituted through work from the margins rather than proximity to centers of power. Drawing on Chokyi Wangchuk’s extensive writings, and engaging scholarship on medieval European frontier monasticism, the paper argues that the frontier lama’s defining features—border mobility, stewardship of endangered lineages, and synthesis of doctrinal traditions—represent a coherent pattern of Tibetan religious activity in the southern borderlands. It further contends that the borderlands functioned not as passive periphery but as an active site for the formation, preservation, and transmission of religious culture.

Scholarship on religion and the body has examined sexuality, purity, and bodily discipline but rarely considers how aging transforms the moral classification of bodies. This paper argues that Islamic traditions regulated female embodiment across the life course by distinguishing between the sexually disruptive body of the young woman and the desexualized body of the elderly woman. Drawing on Islamic legal discourse, waqf endowments, and Sufi hagiography, it shows how aging reconfigured norms governing women’s visibility, mobility, and bodily interaction. Once no longer associated with fitna, elderly women could appear in courts, establish endowments, and participate in devotional life, revealing how regimes of purity and bodily discipline shifted across the life course.

As we collectively imagine future/s, insights from the Choctaw Green Corn Ceremony inspire reconnection with Mother Earth, invigorate rematriation (Maracle 1988), attend to the wisdom of our ancestors, and encourage harmonious relationships. From an Indigenous feminist perspective, hopeful future/s require practices of culture-keeping such as storytelling, which demand the active presence of the community. Prior to removal from the sacred homeland of the Choctaws, the Green Corn Ceremony was the epicenter of social and spiritual celebrations (Pesantubbee 2005). This paper will explore the key elements of this tradition that relate to kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky, gratitude for harvest, renewal of the sun, reminder of death, ecological importance of corn, and matrilineal leadership. Choctaw wisdom from this tragically lost ceremony offers fruitful possibilities to shape survivance for our world and its creatures, including the human ones.

Vietnamese Catholicism is culturally influenced by a double layer of patriarchy: Confucianism and traditional interpretations of Catholicism. Confucian teachings, introduced through a thousand years of rule by the Chinese Han Dynasty, subordinate women in most aspects of life and have become the norm for Vietnamese social relationships and order. Likewise, the patriarchal mindset of the Catholic tradition and biblical passages that subordinate women not only reinforce but divinize Confucian thought and practices in Vietnam. Within this context, Vietnamese Catholic women struggle for equality to find their place in the Church. In this paper, I examine the gaps in gender equality and the context for women in the Vietnamese Church to recommend ways for the Vietnamese Church to improve gender equality, which I call ‘A Future in Negotiation.’ This analysis seeks to empower Vietnamese Catholic women to challenge patriarchal structures and establish a point for dialogue with male Church leaders.

Engaging with Sabrina Strings’ genealogical account of fatphobia’s Protestant origins, Michelle Lelwica’s analysis of diet culture as secularized soteriology, and clinical literature documenting weight stigma as a source of measurable trauma this paper argues that the chronic psychological harm fat people carry is not incidental to Christian theological history—it is, in significant part, its product. Applying this framework of social sin to establish the tradition’s structural complicity in the production of this harm, the paper further demonstrates that Christian communities function as sites of theological amplification, intensifying secular fat stigma through the doctrinal encoding of somatic hierarchy as moral and spiritual failure. The paper then turns constructively to retrieve tradition’s own resources as grounds for a reparative theological anthropology, refusing to condition human dignity on somatic conformity, concluding with an account of what institutional repentance requires. This is justice for fat people—liberation from oppressive systems rooted in religion.

This paper looks at two emerging projects in the American Muslim community: Muslim Futures by Utopia Studios and Muslim Futurism by MIPSTERZ. These two projects have complementary approaches to imagining Muslim futures in the US, and potentially globally, that engage various art forms. The author, as a participant observer in both projects, examines the approaches of each to explore the divergences between them to understand the Muslim communities each imagines. In this investigation, one cannot avoid the theological thinking underlying both groups, either implicitly or explicitly. As such, the projects are about the future of US Muslims, and also of Islamic and Religious Studies. The self-conceptualization of these groups is an invitation to reconsider the categories and approaches we use in the study of Muslims.

Through its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam articulated a vision of Black Muslim futurity grounded in self-determination and scientific progress. This paper considers how Muhammad Speaks presented decolonizing African nations as exemplars for its own dream of an independent nation within America. The newspaper portrayed new African nations as rejecting European influence by “doing for self” and embracing scientific tools to improve health outcomes and increase economic productivity, and it encouraged readers to identify with their progress. As such, these stories were more than news. They offered evidence that Black people were reclaiming their rightful position as the leading civilization on Earth and provided a model for Black people in America to follow as they built their own independent nation. From news about industrialization in Ghana to science fairs at the University of Islam, Muhammad Speaks offered readers a glimpse into the vibrant future Black Muslims were building.

This paper documents the formation of a new Muslim Left in New York City, exploring how members of this movement incorporate Islamic theology and ethics into their political practice. On the heels of electing the city’s first Muslim socialist mayor, Muslim organizers are turning to Islam as a language of resistance against the crises of affordability, capitalist accumulation, and imperialist war. Combining participant observation with in-depth interviews, this project documents how the new Muslim Left is challenging the secular Left’s suspicion of theology through its novel articulation of a progressive political Islam. Across Muslim electoral organizations, cultural institutions, informal study circles, places of worship, and performance spaces, I document how Muslim community leaders, political organizers, and creatives in New York City are forging a contemporary Islamic critique of American capitalism and imperialism.