Christoph Emmrich

Christoph Emmrich (PhD University of Heidelberg, 2004), is Associate Professor for South and Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department for Historical Studies and is Chair of the UofT/McMaster Numata Buddhist Studies Program. His research bridges Southeast and South Asia as it engages with fields as diverse as Burmese and Nepalese Buddhism, and Tamil Jainism. He works with girl children, young women, and ritual specialists in Yangon, Mawlamyine, Mandalay (Burma), in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) and in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India), studying their involvement in practices related to marriage, education, monastic ordination and the consecration of images and, more recently, their poetic and narrative literary production. He confronts the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events with the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals in Burmese, Newar, Pali, Sanskrit and Tamil ranging from the 17th century to the present. In his writings and his teaching Christoph Emmrich addresses questions of gender and childhood, mimesis and memory, translation and travel.

Syllabi at www.sareligionuoft.ca/study/links/classes