简介

Professor Borchert specializes in the religions of East and Southeast Asia. His are of research includes Theravada Buddhist traditions of mainland Southeast Asia and the minorities of China. Other research interests include religion and politics, how states and other actors define religion and related categories and monastic education. He received a Ph.D. (2006) in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago and a B.A. (1992) from Swarthmore College. He is completing a manuscript on monastic education in Southwest China and has begun research on a project which examines citizenship and monastic identity in China and Thailand. In the spring of 2010, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Center at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. He came to UVM in 2006. "I am particularly interested in the ways that definitions have different kinds of lives in the contemporary world. States set forth legal definitions and seek to promulgate these throughout their populace; at the same time this same populace has its own set of (often unstated) definitions. The ways these different definitions play out on the ground can have important consequences for the way people conduct their religious lives. The term religion is a case in point. People in China and Japan often remark that they “have no religion,” but then they regularly perform actions which seem to our eyes as religious. At the same time, the Chinese and Japanese states enact their own definitions of what does and does not constitute legitimate religion. When state definitions and those of the people clash, it can lead to serious problems for the continued practice of a religion or set of religious practices. Understanding these dynamics is important, and complicated by the fact that the academy has its own definitions that do not always cohere directly with those of the people we study. I want students to understand how the lives of definitions affect what we study."