Biography
Ann Gleig is an Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. Her research areas include Buddhism in America, engaged Buddhism, race, gender and sexuality. She is the author of American Buddhism: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism (SUNY Press, 2013). She is finishing a co-written book on sexual abuse in Buddhism with Amy Langenberg (under contract with Yale University Press) and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism (forthcoming). She has published numerous peer-reviewed book chapters and articles and public scholarship pieces and is on the leadership team of the Religion and Sexual Abuse project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Ann has won four teaching awards at UCF including the University Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Her teaching publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and she co-developed the “Teaching Resources for Buddhism, Race and Racism,” for the University of Toronto. Her service positions include editor at the Journal of Global Buddhism, steering committee member of the American Academy of Religion Buddhism Unit and the American Academy of Religion program committee.
Candidate Statement
I am honored to be nominated for the position of Program Unit Director. My first introduction to the AAR came as a first-year graduate student when I shared a hotel room with three other graduate students so we could afford to attend the 2004 San Antonio conference. Alongside the emotional rollercoaster of excitement, overwhelm, optimism, and despair, two memories stand out: a conversation on Hindu nationalist threats to academic freedom and a senior scholar buying me a coffee and taking me seriously as an interlocutor. Nearly twenty years later, now as an associate professor, I am struck by the fact that these memories reflect core priorities for me: the cultivation of scholarship that challenges dominant forms of power and the cultivation of care not just for the intellectual development but also the material and emotional wellbeing of our most marginal members.
Since surviving my sleep-deprived initiation, I have been an active member of the AAR. My interdisciplinary research has resulted in me presenting for over a dozen Units, which, in turn, has enabled me to collaborate across disciplinary subfields. I have served on the steering committee of four units—the Buddhism Unit, the Buddhism in the West Unit, the Religion and Sexuality Unit, and the Mysticism Unit—as well as co-chairing the Mysticism Unit. It has been gratifying to work with colleagues on these Units to expand diversity across multiple vectors: demographic, institutional, and intellectual. I serve on the editorial board for JAAR and have recently participated in the mentorship network of the AAR’s Status of Women in the Profession Committee and the Status of Racial & Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee. For the last two years, I have served on the Program Committee Unit, which has enabled me to better understand the specific challenges as well as opportunities of our field as well as more fully appreciate the labor and commitment of colleagues serving the AAR.
My aim as Program Unit Director would be to build on the considerable work done by my colleagues around initiating and maintaining practices that promote equity and justice, support marginalized members, mentor graduate students, advocate for contingent faculty, and encourage interdisciplinary, collaborative scholarship. As a first-generation queer scholar, in a teaching heavy position at a public school in Florida, I am well-acquainted with the attacks on minorities, academic freedom, and social justice, as well as the depleting grind of education under neo-liberalism. As a professional body we must grapple with the reality that some of our members cannot safely attend this year’s annual meeting and others cannot afford to attend. We must promote practices that mitigate these restrictive conditions.
For me, the role and responsibility of the Program Unit Director is to model how to listen to and think collectively about how we can best support the intellectual and material flourishing of our most vulnerable members—graduate students, contingent faculty, racial, gender and sexual minorities—and how we can best embody the type of professional body that they want to invest in.