Name Anne Blackburn | Role Academic | |
Books Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-century Lankan Monastic Culture | ||
Anne M. Blackburn is a historian of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism. She is Professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian Studies at Cornell University. Blackburn received her B.A. in Asian History and Religion in 1988 from Swarthmore College, her M.A. in Religious Studies in 1990 from University of Chicago Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in History of Religions in 1996 from the same institution. Blackburn's teachers include: Steven Collins, Charles Hallisey, Frank Reynolds, P.B. Meegaskumbura, and Donald Swearer.
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Research
Anne Blackburn was trained to study Buddhism as an historian of religions (in a program greatly influenced by approaches to historical sociology and hermeneutics) rather than as a philologist. Her secondary supervisor worked in Buddhist Studies and South Asian Studies and was (unusually for the field at that time) insistent that the scholars working on Buddhist texts attend to their literary features, and the contexts for their composition and reception. This combination of influences allows Blackburn to approach Buddhist texts with attention to the contexts in which they were composed and used. This led her to substantial work in the history of devotional practices and intellectual history, topics first broached in undergraduate days at Swarthmore College. Blackburn approaches this work with the assumption that the history of Buddhist texts and practices should not be divorced from the history of other forms of life with which they are closely connected, and through which they have been constituted.
Blackburn is currently working on a new project, "Monks, Texts, and Relics: A History of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia". This study aims to examine the Buddhist monastic networks and temple formation in British colonial port cities.
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