Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Based on Blackburn’s forthcoming book, this talk presents case studies from locations in what are now Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. The lecture links the study of premodern Southern Asian Buddhist intellectual history to early second-millennium Indian Ocean processes. In doing so, it becomes possible to see how varied and historically dynamic arguments for and about sovereignty were made by  participants in the premodern Pali arena.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anne M. Blackburn is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Blackburn received her BA from Swarthmore College, and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. Blackburn studies Buddhism in Southern Asia (South & Southeast Asia) at the intersection of literary studies, intellectual history, and political economy, with a particular interest in circulations (intellectual, monastic institutional, political, and trade) involving locations now known as Sri Lanka, India, Burma, and Thailand. Her publications include Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton, 2001), Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago, 2010), “Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean” (JESHO, 2015), and “Buddhist Technologies of Statecraft and Millenial Moments,” (History and Theory, 2017). Blackburn’s new book – Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550 – will be published by the University of Hawa’i Press in late 2023 or early 2024. Research towards this book was supported by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and by the ACLS-Robert H.N. Ho Fellowship Program.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the seminar.