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Dear colleagues, students, and friends of Buddhist Studies,

As we move into spring and summer, we are pleased to greet everyone on behalf of the Ho Centre for Buddhist Studies. In light of the challenges we have all faced over the past two years of the pandemic, we hope all of you are safe and healthy, mentally and physically, and have perhaps found some strength in Buddhist practices to maintain your well-being.

We are pleased to announce some exciting news for the Centre. Dr. SeungJung Kim will be taking a year's leave starting May, as she embarks on a new path of parenthood! We are also thrilled to welcome Dr. Chris Fraser as Acting Director for the Centre for the following year! As the newly appointed Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of East Asian Studies, Dr. Fraser works on Chinese philosophy—including to some extent Chinese Buddhism—and was a Buddhist practitioner himself some time ago in Taiwan.

The second exciting news item involves a new postdoctoral fellow that will be jointly engaged by the HCBS and the DSR at U of T. Dr. Michael Ium, a historian of Tibetan Buddhism and a native of Toronto, will be joining us from California. Please see his featured bio below.

Going forward in 2022, the HCBS will be continuing our Buddhism and posthumanism conversation series and our popular “The Circled Square” podcast about Buddhist Studies in Higher Education. We expect to be organizing an academic conference in the coming year and are exploring the possibility of hosting a series of lectures on Buddhist thought and contemporary social issues, in addition to sponsoring a number of exciting projects from the proposals that were submitted, and which we are now in the process of reviewing.

Professor SeungJung Kim
Director, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies
Associate Chair, Graduate Department of Art History
University of Toronto

Professor Chris Fraser
Acting Director, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies
Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture
Department of Philosophy
Department of East Asian Studies
University of Toronto

Postdoc News

Introducing: Michael Ium


Michael Ium was born in Toronto to immigrant parents from South Korea, with most of his upbringing in Scarborough. Along with a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, Michael has master's degrees from Maitripa College and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and will complete his PhD in Religious Studies at UCSB this summer. Michael is primarily a historian of religion with specialties in Tibet and South Asia. Under the guidance of his advisor José Cabezón, the focus of his dissertation is the early history of Ganden Monastery in Tibet and how that history impacted the construction of the Geluk tradition. He recently spent two years in Nepal and South India translating dozens of classical TIbetan texts related to his dissertation. At University of Toronto, along with refining his dissertation into a monograph, he plans to lay the seeds for a second project on prophecy in Tibet, as well as to contribute to some of the exciting content-development projects happening in the Ho Centre. As he returns to Toronto, Michael is excited to spend time with his family, and to cheer on the Maple Leafs, Raptors, and Blue Jays in person once again. Go Leafs Go!
Posthumanism and Buddhism

Buddhism and Posthumanism Roundtable


Thursday, May 19, 3:00–4:30 pm

Please join us for a Zoom meeting for the and final sixth installment of this year’s series on posthumanism and Buddhism. After a year of thought-provoking presentations and rich conversation, we invite you to join our our speakers for a round-table conversation. What common threads did you hear? How did these research presentations and discussions impact your thinking about the anthropocene and climate change? What do Buddhist studies researchers say about the place of humans in multispecies environments?

We are deeply grateful that Henry Shiu, Shi Wu De Assistant Professor in Chinese Buddhist Studies at Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto, will join our panel for this event.

If you need to refresh your memories about the series or perhaps you missed one of the previous talks, please visit our YouTube playlist for video recordings of the previous talks.

This event is co-sponsored by the Religion in the Public Sphere initiative of the Department for the Study of Religion in the University of Toronto. The  series is organized by Rory Lindsay, Assistant Professor, and Frances Garrett, Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

Register on Zoom here. This event will also be live-streamed to our YouTube channel.

Language Training

2022 Annual Summer School on the Languages and Literatures of Jainism


The 2022 Annual Summer School on the Languages and Literatures of Jainism will take place at the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto from August 2nd to August 7th 2022 in person, with the option to participate online as well. This year's Summer School will focus on reading and contextualizing literature in Apabhraṃśa, an understudied but important classical literary language in which Jain authors in particular wrote numerous poetic works. The Summer School will provide in-depth knowledge of Apabhraṃśa language, prosody and literary genres and discuss the important contribution by Jains to this lesser studied part of India's literary culture.

The daily reading sessions will be led by Prof. Eva De Clercq from Ghent University (Belgium) who is a specialist of Apabhraṃśa and of Jain literature in general, and who recently published the first English translation of the oldest extant Apabhraṃśa work (Murty Classical Library of India). Besides the reading sessions there will be guest lectures on Jain Apabhraṃśa literature and its place within Indian classical literature as well as social activities such as a visit to a local Jain temple.
 
Each day will consist of two sessions: a morning reading session on a text that will be continued for the duration of the workshop and an afternoon session in which we will explore a wider variety of Jain and non-Jain Apabhraṃśa texts. In addition, several days will have an afternoon lecture. Since the Summer School is language focused, we ask participants to have an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit, Prakrit or Old-Hindi.
 
There are no fees associated with attending the workshop itself, and funding for room and board is available for a limited number of graduate students from outside the GTA. In order to secure the health and safety for all participants we ask of everyone to be fully vaccinated.
 
Interested candidates for this Summer School should apply by sending their CV and a 200-word motivation detailing how this workshop helps them in their research. This is asked of both in-person as well as online participants. Candidates who apply for in-person participation should also provide proof of vaccination. The deadline for applications is May 20th 2022. You will receive a response from us by May 30th 2022.
 
Please send your applications as well as any further inquiries to Heleen De Jonckheere.
The University of Toronto operates on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River, and it is still home to many Indigenous people. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.
Copyright © 2022 Centre for Buddhist Studies, All rights reserved.


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