I am a pākehā New Zealander currently living in southern Germany. I completed my MA in Religious Studies at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and then my PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in New York, USA.

As an academic, I’m interested in what it meant to understand oneself as “Buddhist” in medieval South Asia. This isn’t an idle question: attending closely to the specifics of this question, and its many answers, in this time and place help us to better reflect on the assumptions (gendered, classist, religious) we bring to more contemporary debates about identity and society. Such assumptions—and the historiographic fallacies they encourage—contribute, I think, to our false sense of the inevitability of the modern (in all its unseemly guises: capitalist, statist, nationalist, sexist, colonialist, white supremacist…). I aim to problematise this picture, by demonstrating the wide range of complex, nuanced and often competing political visions constructed and contested by Buddhists throughout history.

More generally, I’m increasingly interested in how case studies like Poḷonnaruva help to problematise decidedly modernist conceptions of religious and cultural boundaries. We have tended to assume that “to be Buddhist” historically meant “to not be Hindu,” or even “to be anti-Hindu” (or “anti-Muslim” for that matter). But this understanding is an ill fit for premodern Southern Asia: the Buddha is a reincarnation of Viṣṇu; Viṣṇu was tasked by the Buddha to protect the island of Sri Lanka. My research into the intellectual (and, increasingly, the literary) history of medieval Sri Lanka shows how monks and monarchs alike freely exchanged ideas and practices across such supposed boundaries—a powerful counterweight, perhaps, to modernist ideas of irrevocable difference.