Laura Stone '90 is Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia, overseeing U.S. policy towards and relations with India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, and Bhutan. She will discuss her wide-ranging career in the U.S. Foreign Service, as well as her perspective on diplomatic statecraft in the 21st century.

Previously, Ms. Stone served as Director of the India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, and Bhutan Affairs Office, Special Advisor to the Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, and was Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia from 2017 to 2019. She has worked as the Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs; Director of the Economic Policy Office in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs; and Economic Counselor in Hanoi, Vietnam. She served three tours in Beijing as well as tours in Bangkok, Tokyo, the Public Affairs Bureau, the Pentagon Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Ms. Stone joined the Department of State in 1991 and is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister Counselor.

Ms. Stone has an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Cornell University.

This event is co-sponsored by the South Asia Center at Syracuse University.

Please join us for an invited talk by Prof. Lucinda Ramberg, generously co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies, History and Philosophy; the South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Religious Studies Programs; and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. The event is open to all interested, and special accommodations can be made for access upon request.

In 1956 anti-caste philosopher and statesman Dr. B.R. Ambedkar called upon his followers to convert to Buddhism as the equalitarian religion of the original inhabitants of the subcontinent. Drawing on ethnographic research, Prof. Ramberg reflects on the relationship present day Ambedkarites have to the history of ancient Buddhism. She elaborates the implications of statements by Ambedkarite Buddhists such as “we are remembering who we are” and reclaiming “our forbidden history” for the temporality of caste in relation to the politics of archaeology, gender, and history.

Lucinda Ramberg is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research projects in South India have roots in longstanding engagements with the politics of sexuality, gender and religion. Her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press 2014) explores the possibilities of vernacular religion as gendered world making and caste critique. Her current book project turns to the revival of Buddhism in South India and questions of religious conversion in relation to projects of caste radicalism, social transformation, and sexual politics. She is a 2020 Research Fellow, The ACLS/ Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation in Buddhist Studies.

Due to COVID-era regulations, all attendees are required to register for this event here: http://cglink.me/2ee/r992603

Upon registration you should receive an automated email with the Zoom link. If for any reason you do not receive this email, please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu.

Please join us for an invited talk by Prof. Ann Gleig, generously co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies, History and Philosophy; the South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Religious Studies Programs; the Society for the Humanities; and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. The event is open to all interested, and special accommodations can be made for access upon request.

In May 2015, 125 Buddhists gathered for the first “White House-U.S. Buddhist Leadership Conference,” during which they delivered a letter titled “Buddhist Statement on Racial Justice.” Inspired by “the courage and leadership of the people of Ferguson,” the letter is part of efforts to challenge racism in American Buddhist convert communities spanning over two decades. For much of this time, such efforts have been marginalized. Due to the combination of a network of Buddhist Teachers of Color and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, however, such work is being increasingly centered. This paper will highlight the pragmatic and doctrinal strategies employed to integrate racial justice into American convert Buddhism and reflect on the significance of such work for Buddhist modernism in the United States.

Ann Gleig is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Central Florida. She is co-editor of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism and has published widely on contemporary Buddhism. She is the author of “American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity,” from Yale University Press, which has been called "a book that will permanently change the way that we teach and research American Buddhism and Buddhism in the West" (McNicholl 2020). Prof. Gleig received her doctorate in religious studies from Rice University, her master’s in religious studies from Lancaster University, and her bachelor’s in theology and religious studies from Bristol University.

Due to COVID-era regulations, all attendees are required to register for this event here: http://cglink.me/2ee/r987809

Upon registration you should receive an automated email with the Zoom link. If for any reason you do not receive this email, please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu.

Please join us for an invited talk by Prof. Jay Garfield, generously co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies, History and Philosophy; the South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Religious Studies Programs; and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. The event is open to all interested, and special accommodations can be made for access upon request.

In this talk, Prof. Garfield will explore Buddhist accounts of the illusion that our access to our own experience is immediate and largely veridical; that we have direct first-person access to our own minds; and that the duality between subject and object that structures our understanding of our experience is primordial. This is the illusion that we are subjects standing over and against a world who know the external world only through the mediation of our sensory and cognitive faculties, and in virtue of our immediate access to the output of those faculties. We will first consider Madhyamaka arguments for the mediated nature of even first-person knowledge. We then turn to Yogācāra critiques of dualistic understandings of experience and accounts of non-duality. This will set the stage for a consideration of Śāntarakṣita’s synthesis of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. We will finish our survey of Buddhist responses to cognitive illusion with the a visit to the Zen tradition, which offers a way to understand the world free of the illusions of subjectivity while at the same time recognizing their pervasiveness and inevitability. Prof Garfield's aim is to show that the Buddhist tradition gets this issue roughly right, and that we can learn a great deal about subjectivity through careful attention to the multiple ways in which Buddhist philosophers have considered this issue.

Due to COVID-era regulations, all attendees are required to register for this event here: http://cglink.me/2ee/r987852

Upon registration you should receive an automated email with the Zoom link. If for any reason you do not receive this email, please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu.

Please join us for an invited talk by Prof. Kristin Scheible, generously co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies, History and Philosophy; the South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Religious Studies Programs; and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. The event is open to all interested, and special accommodations can be made for access upon request.

Kristin Scheible is a scholar of South Asian Religions. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and B.A. from Colby College. Her research interests include Theravāda Buddhist history, the genre of historical narrative literature (vaṃsa) in the Pāli language, rhetorical strategies employed in Pāli and Sanskrit texts, and the affective domain provoked by religious texts. Her first book, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History (Columbia University Press, 2016), explores the work-like dimension of the fifth century Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa, and destabilizes the dominant reading of this text as a political charter. In 2014, after ten years at Bard College, she enthusiastically returned home to Portland to join the Reed faculty and raise her three kids under Douglas firs. She is a member of the Hum 110 faculty, and teaches courses in Buddhism, Hinduism, emotion and the arousal of faith, gender and South Asian religious nationalisms.

Due to COVID-era regulations, all attendees are required to register for this event here: http://cglink.me/2ee/r993177

Upon registration you should receive an automated email with the Zoom link. If for any reason you do not receive this email, please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu.

Please join us for an invited talk by Prof. Jack Meng-Tat Chia, generously co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies, History and Philosophy; the South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Religious Studies Programs; and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. The event is open to all interested, and special accommodations can be made for access upon request.

Chinese Buddhists have never remained stationary. They have always been on the move. Why did Buddhist monks migrate from China to Southeast Asia? How did they participate in transregional Buddhist networks across the South China Sea? In this talk, Prof. Chia will tell the story of “South China Sea Buddhism,” referring to a Buddhism that emerged from a swirl of correspondence networks, forced exiles, voluntary visits, evangelizing missions, institution-building campaigns, and organizational efforts of countless Chinese and Chinese diasporic Buddhist monks. Drawing on multilingual research conducted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Prof. Chia challenges the conventional categories of “Chinese Buddhism” and “Southeast Asian Buddhism” by focusing on the lesser-known—yet no less significant—Chinese Buddhist communities of maritime Southeast Asia. By crossing the artificial spatial frontier between China and Southeast Asia, this talk brings Southeast Asia into the study of Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism into the study of Southeast Asia.

Jack Meng-Tat Chia is Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on Buddhism and Chinese popular religion in Southeast Asia, transnational Buddhism, and Sino-Southeast Asian interactions. He is the author of Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea (Oxford, 2020), as well as articles in Archipel, Asian Ethnology, China Quarterly, Contemporary Buddhism, History of Religions, and the Journal of Chinese Religions.

Due to COVID-era regulations, all attendees are required to register for this event here: http://cglink.me/2ee/r987837

Upon registration you should receive an automated email with the Zoom link. If for any reason you do not receive this email, please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu.

CCCI welcomes Gerald Roche, Senior Research Fellow, Politics, LaTrobe University to speak on Tibet, China, and Settler Colonialism. Tibet, China, and Settler Colonialism He states:

The term settler colonialism is increasingly being used to describe the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and its so-called ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans and Uyghurs. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of settler colonialism as both a framework for scholarly analysis and real-world practice of domination. I will also explore how this term is being applied to the PRC, with reference to Tibet, and discuss how describing the Tibetan situation as settler-colonial differs from other approaches to the Tibet issue. As a way of illustrating this approach, I will discuss urbanization in Tibet as a technique of settler colonialism, particularly the relationship between urbanization and migration.