Please join us in celebrating our members on their professional news and accomplishments!
As a reminder, AAR publishes member accomplishments including new publications, award announcements, and media mentions. Share your wins with us!
Awards and Accomplishments
Several AAR Members Awarded Public Impact Grants in Buddhist Studies from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies (ACLS)
Natasha Heller, University of Virginia
Buddhist Environmental Storytelling: A Workshop
“Buddhist Environmental Storytelling” is a four-day workshop on public environmental storytelling led by Natasha Heller in collaboration with Kerri Arsenault at Morven, the University of Virginia’s place-based, land-centered sustainability lab. Throughout history, Buddhists have used different storytelling forms to educate, entertain, and motivate practitioners. These stories have often been in service of cultivating an ethics of cross-species care that aligns with the ideals fostered and supported by contemporary environmentalism. The workshop asks: How can we employ the methods, practices, and goals of environmental storytelling so that Buddhist environmental perspectives reach a broad audience, while simultaneously deepening our responsibilities to the more-than-human world?
Jimmy Yu, Florida State University
Interdependence: Bridging Chinese Huayan Buddhism and Western Buddhist Practice
This project translates and publishes two previously untranslated foundational Huayan texts with scholarly and practice-oriented introductions, annotations, and commentary, with the aim of immediately applying them in practice settings through hybrid meditation retreats (Barre, Center 2026, San Francisco Zen Center & Tallahassee Chan Center 2027), a month-long intensive residency course (2027), at least ten Dharma talks, two mainstream Buddhist journal articles, and more than twenty pieces of digital media. The initiative aims to integrate Huayan’s profound teachings on interdependence into Western Buddhist practice and scholarship, reaching numerous practitioners directly and has the potential to reach thousands of people in the broader public sector while enriching academic studies of Chinese Buddhism.
Carolyn Chen, University of California, Berkeley
Chenxing Han, Independent Scholar
Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of the West
We the Sangha: A Podcast Series on Buddhist Asian America
“We the Sangha: A Podcast Series on Buddhist Asian America” is a six-episode, story-driven podcast series that explores the transformative impact of Asian American Buddhists on US society. Curated and hosted by author and scholar Chenxing Han and produced by Axis Mundi Media in partnership with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), the series features conversations with artists, activists, and scholars to illuminate the diversity of Buddhist Asian America—across ethnicities, generations, and traditions. Blending rigorous research with intimate storytelling, “We the Sangha” offers an empathetic, community-rooted lens on race, religion, and belonging, advancing public understanding of Asian American Buddhism’s contributions to America’s cultural and spiritual fabric.
Books and Publications
Brooke Kathleen Brassard
Thirsty Land into Springs of Water: Negotiating a Place in Canada as Latter-day Saints
Looking at the example of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Thirsty Land into Springs of Water answers questions about Canadian and religious identities, immigration, and integration. Brooke Kathleen Brassard sheds light on the Latter-day Saint experience in southern Alberta between 1887 and 1947, revealing how the Latter-day Saints integrated into Canadian society while maintaining their “peculiar” identity through architecture, business practices, political participation, gendered roles, and family structures.
Drawing on family histories, correspondence, meeting minutes, and oral histories, Brassard explores how the Church negotiated the tension between integration and otherness. The book demonstrates how Latter-day Saints in southern Alberta embedded themselves in the social, economic, and political structures of Canada and how they adapted Mormonism to Canadian circumstances. It draws on the concept of “lived religion” and historical methodologies to reveal the complications that occur in the process of negotiation for members of a minority religion in Canada. Thirsty Land into Springs of Water ultimately illuminates the ways in which mainstream Canadian society forces newcomers to decide what they will adopt, reject, or adapt in order to belong.
Jue Liang
Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel
Conceiving the Mother of Tibet is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, revered as the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on the Tibetan Nyingma Buddhist tradition. Through careful textual analysis, the book constructs an emic (insider) Tibetan Buddhist theory of gender and female religious eminence, examining how Yeshe Tsogyel’s multifaceted identities–as a devoted disciple, tantric consort, sky-goer (dakini), and spiritual mother–embody a dialectic that shifts back and forth between Tibetan women’s social and cultural marginalization and a Buddhist discourse of soteriological inclusivity.
Jue Liang queries these texts for their social and religious functions, especially where ambivalence and contradictions abound. However, these ambivalences do not necessarily disadvantage women in Tibetan Buddhism. Operating with ambivalent, sometimes competing, discourses on womanhood, Nyingma Buddhist theorists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created a space for a flexible treatment of gender, where they traverse between theological terms and embodied reality.
Ultimately, Conceiving the Mother of Tibet not only illuminates the unique position of Yeshe Tsogyel within Tibetan Buddhist literature but also offers a methodological framework for understanding localized theories of gender. This approach highlights alternative ways of being and acting in the world as embodied agents, providing valuable insights for the broader field of Buddhist studies.
Ann Gillian Chu
Hong Kong Christianities and Civic Life
This book explores Protestant Christianity in Hong Kong through an ethnographic study of Hong Kong Christians at a time of societal change (2013-2014 and 2019-2020).Revealing how selected published theologians and average lay Christians in Hong Kong understand ideas of democracy, human rights, civic identity, and civil disobedience, this book draws on the works of Hong Kong theologians, alongside the lay theologies of Hong Kong Christian interview participants and, by extension, those in the diaspora. It provides a critical examination of how pro-democracy and pro-establishment Christians understand and negotiate the relationship between national identity, democratic values, and Christian convictions. The book also explores the concept of the ‘third way’ for Hong Kong Christians, an alternative space than either pro-establishment or pro-democracy Christians, ultimately revealing that human rights and democracy concepts cannot be understood in the same way in Hong Kong as in Western contexts.This book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Hong Kong studies, World Christianity, theological ethics, and practical theology.
In the News/Public Scholarship
Deepak Sarma Publishes Essay in The Common Reader
The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis, offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction engaging the essential debates and issues of our time. Deepak Sarma has recently published an essay called, “Līlā: How the art of play is what makes the liberal arts liberal, and important.”