Tyler A. Lehrer

Credentials: PhD Student

Position title: History

Previous Institution(s)
University of Colorado Boulder; California State University
Areas of Research Interest
My current research examines connections across maritime Buddhist kingdoms in what are now Sri Lanka and central Thailand. I aspire to chart the emergence of mutilocal religious, political, and interregional affiliation as these operated an interconnected Indian Ocean world, particularly in the context of the Dutch East India Company’s commercial projects in and especially between these polities. I am captivated by the ways that Buddhist monastics, monarchs, and especially ordinary people have cultivated and maintained often tenuous networks of cooperation across the Bay of Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century, and how these circulations operated as valuable historical resources as they were—and still are—invoked in subsequent historical writing, and in contemporary disputes throughout Southern Asia in the contexts of gender, ethnicity, and contested visions of pluralist religious modernity. My research is conducted in, and prior language training includes, Sinhala, Thai, Dutch, and Sanskrit.
Areas of General Interest
History of Theravāda Buddhism(s) • Southern Asian gender history • Early modern Indian Ocean history • Southeast Asian religious history • Transnational religious movements • Religion, gender, and nationalism • Religious studies method and theory
List of published and non-published works
“Mobilizing Gendered Piety in Sri Lanka’s Contemporary Bhikkhunī Ordination Dispute,” Buddhist Studies Review 36, no. 1 (2019): 99-121. Review of Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives, eds. R. Michael Feener and Anne M. Blackburn, Asian Ethnology 79, no. 2 (2020): 413-15. Review of Buddhism, Politics, and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka, by Benjamin Schonthal, Asian Ethnology 77, nos. 1 & 2 (2018): 470–472. “Women in Mahāyāna Buddhism” (1500 words) and “Women’s Buddhist Networks” (750 words) in Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History, ed. Susan de Gaia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 2018).
Favorite part about CSA
I love the amazing community of scholars and friends, as well as the myriad opportunities for language study, collaboration, and samosas!
Hobbies
In addition to my research and the opportunities for travel, cultural immersion, and language study it opens up, I enjoy road and trail running, hiking, backpacking, reading the occasional novel, going to shows, and especially cooking and eating together with good company.
Favorite part of living in Madison
The amazing restaurants, its multiple, diverse, and vibrant neighborhoods, the Farmer’s Market, UW–Madison, its running trails, and especially its sunsets!