In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.

This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.

Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.

This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.

Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.

This paper reads Li Bai’s poems on Mount Song as a small corpus linking poetic form to the social and institutional life of a sacred mountain. Rather than treating his “Daoism” as personal temperament projected onto scenery, I show how the poems presuppose Songshan as a worked religious terrain: a Central Marchmount shaped by past legends of transcendents, sites of retreat and rare herbs, imperial sacrifice, and abbeys. Four clusters anchor the analysis: poems on Yuan Danqiu that make friendship and visiting a way of locating aspiration; the sweet flag gatherer poem that condenses the Han Wudi legend into a fleeting encounter with a transcendent; a farewell poem that ties imagined residence to herb gathering; and an address to a female Daoist master that builds presence through absence. Together, they show Songshan made visible through acts of visiting, seeking, and naming: where friendship, hagiographic memory, and institutions converge

This paper explores the Ming woman poet Ye Xiaoluan’s (1616–1632) posthumous identity as a Daoist female immortal in three Ming biographies. Apart from certain historical facts about Xiaoluan’s human life, these biographies highlight her family members’ spiritual encounters with Xiaoluan during her various “returns” as a female immortal. The sections on Xiaoluan’s afterlife suggest the possibility of studying these biographies as hagiographies, which will shed light on how a late imperial cultural figure was remembered and immortalized. The paper analyzes how the notions of poetry and space play a significant role in the writers’ construction of Xiaoluan’s Daoist identity. To convince the readers of her Daoist identity, how did the three authors imagine and depict the sacred spaces? How did poetry participate in legitimizing these writers’ claim of Xiaoluan’s new identity as a Daoist immortal? 

This paper develops a method for reading classical Chinese poetry when it appears as quotation on social media and becomes attached to contemporary places. It begins with a 2016 Weibo “#早自习” (“morning self-study”) post that simply quotes Wang Bo’s Tang poem Xun daoguan (“Seeking a Daoist Temple”). Rather than treating this as a purely literary gesture, the paper argues that quoted poems reflect and participate in devotional practices present across contemporary China. Expanding outward to posts about Daoist caves and temples, it shows how social media posts often emerge during travel experiences, religious visits, or heightened emotional states such as nostalgia, fatigue, longing, or serenity. In these contexts, quoted poetry functions as an emotional intensifier, a legitimizing voice, and a form of cultural capital. The paper demonstrates how feeling gathers around caves—imagined as liminal, sheltered zones of sacred depth—illuminating contemporary expressions of popular Daoism

This paper examines how a form of political theology emerges in the interplay between Urdu poetry and its critical traditions. Focusing on a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem by Mirza Asad Allāh Khān Ghalib, composed shortly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the study explores the poem’s image of Judgement Day as a mahshar-e khayāl, or “a resurrection ground of thought.” The poem moves between solitude and collective assembly to advance two theological insights: that the individual contains internal multitudes of thought (even if inaccessible), and that resurrection transforms forgetfulness into awareness. Reading the poem alongside later commentary, the paper argues that the nineteenth-century Urdu literary culture articulates political theology beyond reformist prose, complicating assumptions about the secular character of Urdu literary criticism. 

This paper draws on my doctoral research on Indo-Islamic music in South Asia to discuss how the hyperlocal travelling cultures of Indo-Islamic music becomes a tool to map the rhizomatic networks of inter-city migration of North Indian Muslims to Bengal in the mid 19th century. The varied consequences of the movement and displacement of Bihari Muslims and its associated socio-political vulnerabilities forms the core of this chapter. Deriving from ethnography conducted in Little Awadh in Calcutta I argue how the Shia liturgies of Hussaini poet Saleha Begum Maqhfi encode the “hijrat” or migration of Bihari Muslim families to Calcutta. Based on literary and textual analysis of exemplary marsiya and nauha composed by Maqhfi, I wish to argue how her Indo-Islamic liturgies honouring Imam Hussain’s valour and benefaction may also add to our understating of the many socio-political and emotional anxieties faced by Bihari “mutwassit” (middle class) Muslims of Little Awadh in Calcutta. 

This paper examines the making and circulation of tāʿziyas in the small towns of Masauli, Biswan, and Mahmudabad in North India to explore how mourning for Imam Husayn becomes embedded in practices of craft, labor, and devotion. While scholarship on Muharram has largely focused on major urban centers such as Lucknow or Hyderabad, this study shifts attention to qasbati contexts where tāʿziyadari is sustained through localized networks of artisans, patrons, and devotees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation during Muharram processions, the paper argues that the tāʿziya functions not merely as a symbolic representation of Husayn’s shrine in Karbala but as an intercessory object through which devotees seek closeness to God (Allah).

This paper examines how a form of political theology emerges in the interplay between Urdu poetry and its critical traditions. Focusing on a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem by Mirza Asad Allāh Khān Ghalib, composed shortly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the study explores the poem’s image of Judgement Day as a mahshar-e khayāl, or “a resurrection ground of thought.” The poem moves between solitude and collective assembly to advance two theological insights: that the individual contains internal multitudes of thought (even if inaccessible), and that resurrection transforms forgetfulness into awareness. Reading the poem alongside later commentary, the paper argues that the nineteenth-century Urdu literary culture articulates political theology beyond reformist prose, complicating assumptions about the secular character of Urdu literary criticism. 

This paper draws on my doctoral research on Indo-Islamic music in South Asia to discuss how the hyperlocal travelling cultures of Indo-Islamic music becomes a tool to map the rhizomatic networks of inter-city migration of North Indian Muslims to Bengal in the mid 19th century. The varied consequences of the movement and displacement of Bihari Muslims and its associated socio-political vulnerabilities forms the core of this chapter. Deriving from ethnography conducted in Little Awadh in Calcutta I argue how the Shia liturgies of Hussaini poet Saleha Begum Maqhfi encode the “hijrat” or migration of Bihari Muslim families to Calcutta. Based on literary and textual analysis of exemplary marsiya and nauha composed by Maqhfi, I wish to argue how her Indo-Islamic liturgies honouring Imam Hussain’s valour and benefaction may also add to our understating of the many socio-political and emotional anxieties faced by Bihari “mutwassit” (middle class) Muslims of Little Awadh in Calcutta. 

This paper examines the making and circulation of tāʿziyas in the small towns of Masauli, Biswan, and Mahmudabad in North India to explore how mourning for Imam Husayn becomes embedded in practices of craft, labor, and devotion. While scholarship on Muharram has largely focused on major urban centers such as Lucknow or Hyderabad, this study shifts attention to qasbati contexts where tāʿziyadari is sustained through localized networks of artisans, patrons, and devotees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation during Muharram processions, the paper argues that the tāʿziya functions not merely as a symbolic representation of Husayn’s shrine in Karbala but as an intercessory object through which devotees seek closeness to God (Allah).

At the outset of the 20th century L'Action Francaise and Le Sillon, the former identified with the philosophy of Charles Maurras, the latter with Marc Sangnier, vied for the allegiance of Francophone Catholics more largely and the Catholic hierarchy more particularly. Maurras valued the Church as supporter of order and discipline and increasingly gained its support while over the same period Le Sillon ran afoul of the hierarchy, receiving condemnation in 1910. In the 1920s it was Action Francaise's turn to receive condemnation. The paper focuses on the interrelations of the two movements up to the condemnation of 1910.

This paper examines Adolf von Harnack’s rapid transition from public supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm II to defender of the Weimar Republic, arguing that his particular brand of Lutheran Kulturprotestantismus provided the theological resources to make this political transition in ways unavailable to many of his contemporaries. Situating his case within contemporary theories of religious nationalism (Brubaker, Gorski, Rieffer, Soper and Fetzer, Türkmen), this paper contends that prevailing typologies do not adequately account for how religious-national identities are renegotiated across changes in regime type. Harnack’s career reveals how the Lutheran two-kingdoms inheritance, combined with Kulturprotestantismus’s identification of Christianity with cultural achievement rather than with a specific political form, enabled a flexible religious nationalism adaptable to both monarchical and republican governance. This case complicates the binary between royalist and democratic forms of religious nationalism and has implications for understanding religion’s role in contemporary contexts of democratization, democratic backsliding, and regime change.

This paper elucidates the dynamics of moral social criticism in the transnational, cross-cultural missionary encounter, circa 1865-1900. It addresses the ways in which missionaries navigated questions of national identity and culture in the geopolitical interstices between nation-states. Turning to models of worldwide religious and cultural pluralism in American social life, such as the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, this paper investigates how ecumenical efforts to put religion on display, so to speak, galvanized the formal codification of cross-cultural missionary methods. Mining the discourse of seasoned missionaries (e.g., John L. Nevius), theologians (e.g., J. Gresham Machen), cultural relativists (e.g., Franz Boas), and grassroots efforts at missionary mobilization, I argue that cultural diversity on the world stage provided missionary-minded American Protestants a conceptual model for engaging religious diversity in their own nation. The outcome was the relativization of culture and intra-tradition criticism.