Trained in the history of religions, I specialize in the study of South Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism, and particularly Mahāyāna sūtra literature. In general terms, my work addresses questions regarding the relationship between religious narrative 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. 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 sophisticated literary strategies. 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 transhistorical religious community. 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.
Photo: Paradise Valley from Hogback Ridge, Montana