Nathan McGovern

Faculty Profile

Nathan McGovern

Biography

I teach World of Ideas and courses on Asian religions in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at UW-Whitewater. In my research, I’m interested in exploring the boundary and interactions between Buddhism and Brahmanism/Hinduism. I explore this boundary in two contexts: ancient India (late first millennium BCE) and Thailand (historically and in the present). In ancient India, I’m interested in better understanding the way in which Buddhist and Brahmanical (as well as Jain) identities arose and interacted with one another. In Thailand, I’m interested in the role that superficially “Hindu” elements play in the overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist religious context. I am the author of two academic books, The Snake and the Mongoose and Holy Things, both with Oxford University Press, and an introductory textbook, Seeing Through Religion, published by Routledge. Currently I am working on a new academic book project, tentatively titled Brahmanism in the Shadow of Buddhism, which will argue that ancient India was dominated by Buddhism and that the Mahabharata should be understood as a historical agent that brought about the changes in classical Hinduism rather than simply reflecting them.