Education

• BA, University of Georgia
• PhD in Religious Studies, Committee for the Study of Religion at Harvard University

Research Interests

My main area of study is Burmese (Myanmar) Buddhism. I have been especially interested in Burmese traditions of meditation and, following from that, in the transformations of meditative practices (and the understandings of reality they convey explicitly and implicitly) as they spread around the world. My first book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Chicago, 2013), explores the origins of mass insight meditation in Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It was a co-winner of the Toshihide Numata book prize in Buddhism from the Center for Buddhist Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Currently, I am deep into a book project, tentatively titled A Great Awakening: Insight Meditation and the Transformation of American Spirituality, that explores the role of insight practice in contemporary reformulations of notions about the self and society within the globalized insight meditation scene.  I have also begun a book project exploring the work and mythic function of Buddhaghosa within the Theravada worldview.

Teaching

• Early Buddhism
• The historical development of Buddhist meditation traditions
• South and Southeast Asian Buddhisms
• Theravada Buddhism, particularly the Buddhist traditions of Myanmar
• Buddhism and the modern world
• Buddhism in America

Selected Publications

• “Theravāda in America.”  In The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism. Edited by Ann Gleig and Scott Mitchell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
• “Seeing through Mindfulness.” In The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice. Edited by Kevin Trainor and Paula K. Arai. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
• “Prayer of the Seven Stations (Sattaṭhāna) – Introduction.” Journal of Burma Studies 21.1 (June 2017).
• Buddhist Studies and the Scientific Study of Meditation. Co-edited with David McMahan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
•  “Mindful but not Religious: Science and Naturalized Enchantment in the Work of Jon Kabat-Zinn.”  In Buddhist Studies and the Scientific Study of Meditation.
• The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• “The United States of Jhana: Varieties of Modern Buddhism in America.” In Buddhism beyond Borders. Edited by Scott Mitchell and Natalie Quli. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015.
•  “Meditation En Masse: A Genealogy of Insight Meditation.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (Spring 2014).
• “Local and Translocal in the Study of Theravada Buddhism and Modernity.” Religion Compass 3 (2009).