This graduate seminar introduces students to the study of Buddhism in Theravada Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka through a critical survey of recent scholarship in such fields as religious history, cultural history and literary history, focusing on the modern era. Once dismissed as Buddhism of the “Lesser Vehicle”, Theravada Buddhism is a dynamic field of belief and practice whose responses to modernity include moral reform, textual purification, anticolonial protest, passive disobedience, meditation movements and militant nationalism.

This course is a survey of the histories, cultures, and religions of mainland Southeast Asia from the period of the early Khmer empire until the 2000s. It surveys the countries of Cambodia, Myanmar/Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

This course surveys the history, culture and religion of the Indian Subcontinent, starting with the archaeological evidence from the Indus Valley Civilization in the third millennium B.C.E. and ending with the period preceding the cultural and political ascendancy of Islam in the thirteenth century.