Trained in the history of religions, I specialize in the study of South Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism, and particularly Mahāyāna sūtra literature. Like most folks in religious studies, my research hovers around a set of interlocking and nested questions. Most generally, my work addresses questions regarding the relationship between religious narrative discourse and the social world. In more field-specific terms, this "big picture" question translates to questions like: What can careful reading of Mahāyāna sūtras tell us about the development of Buddhist traditions and literary cultures? How can we read sūtras to catch glimpses of the communities both behind and before the texts? How might the study of Mahāyāna sūtras allow specialists of other traditions to ask new questions of their material? And how might the sūtras themselves invite us to rethink our own frameworks and questions?
My recent work focuses primarily on a Mahāyāna sūtra called the Precious Banner (Skt. Ratnaketuparivarta; Tib. 'Dus pa chen po rin po che tog gi gzungs). Although the Precious Banner is known and occasionally cited in Buddhist studies scholarship, the work as a whole is sorely understudied despite its intriguing and dramatic narrative of Māra's failed yet incompletely quelled rebellion against the Buddha Śākyamuni. My developing first book (based on my dissertation) argues that the Precious Banner contains what I call an affective regime—a set of feeling rules that seeks to structure how readers feel, in this case with respect to the sūtra itself—and invites readers to align themselves with its norms by leveraging literary strategies like focalization, analepsis and prolepsis, and self-reference. In encountering such feeling rules, readers learn how they ought to feel about the text they have before them. And insofar as they adopt and cultivate these norms for themselves, I argue, they come to join a community transhistorical in scope. Though seemingly hyper-focused on just one text, this study ultimately aims to offer a synthesis between the so-called linguistic and affective turns in the study of religion.
My training and research have been generously funded by Richland Community College (Trustees Scholarship); Western Illinois University (Homer Wilson, Honors, Paul Mundschenk, and Mary Olive Woods Scholarships); the University of Missouri (Graduate School Fellowship); the University of Chicago (Graduate Aid Initiative, Perrin Fund Travel Grants); the University of Chicago Divinity School (DSA Travel Grants, Dissertation Completion Grant); the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (Dissertation Fellowship); 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha (Translation Grants); and Heartland Community College (Conference Travel Grant). My dissertation was awarded honors by the University of Chicago Divinity School. My work has been presented at the American Academy of Religion (both regional and national meetings), the University of Cambridge, Florida State University, and the Theory and Practice of South Asia Seminar at the University of Chicago.
Photo: Paradise Valley from Hogback Ridge, Montana