Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Thai Professor of Theravada Buddhism
About
Research interests:
I work on Buddhism, literature, and music in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. My research spans the medieval period to the present, focusing on handwritten materials—bark-paper documents, palm-leaf manuscripts, and stone inscriptions—and their performative realization in speech, chant, and song. I have long worked with Thai, Khmer, Lanna, Lao, Pali, and Sanskrit sources, and more recently with those in Tai Khün, Tai Lue, Shan, and Vietnamese. In the field of Khmer literature, I authored Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (Shambhala Publications, 2022) and co-edited a major anthology, Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). Recent publications include articles on Thai literary history, Lao and Shan exegesis, Theravada nuns, Pali-vernacular homiletics, Khmer epigraphy, and Vietnamese Buddhist translation.
My in-progress monograph, “Classical Reading, Vernacular Writing: A Bitextual History of Southeast Asian Buddhism,” is an intellectual history of Buddhist translation that primarily draws on manuscript evidence from central and northern Thailand between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. It charts the emergence of Pali- and Sanskrit-vernacular bilingual texts across the country—as well as neighboring regions of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Yunnan—by showing how second-millennium monastics crafted new techniques for translating Indic texts. My arguments reframe the story of how vernacular literature came to thrive in mainland Southeast Asia by centering Buddhist approaches to reading and writing.
Teaching interests:
My courses are grounded in South and Southeast Asian texts and musical genres as platforms to explore enduring questions of language, religion, and meaning. In addition to survey courses on Theravada Buddhism and Southeast Asian literature, I also teach seminars that build bridges between song and poetry, religion and magic, Buddhism and translation, and Southeast Asia and its many diasporas.
Personal website:
www.trentwalker.org
