Faculty Profiles

Kristin Scheible is a scholar of South Asian religions.  She serves as Chair of the Religion Department, Co-PI for the Mellon-funded Environmental Humanities Initiative, and as co-chair of the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion unit of the American Academy of Religion. She received a BA in Religious Studies and Art History from Colby College, a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and her PhD from Harvard University. Her philologically-grounded first book, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History (Columbia University Press, 2016) challenges standard political readings of this Buddhist text and foregrounds instead the literary imagination it engenders. She recently co-edited and co-authored a volume, The Buddha: A Storied Life (Oxford University Press, 2024), bringing together leading scholars of South Asian Buddhism to examine the paradigmatic episodes that constitute the Buddha's biography. Her recent work appears in several journals and volumes, including Cambridge Companion to Religion and War (2023), The Epic World (Routledge, 2023), and the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (2024). She is currently working on Fruitful Metaphors: Cultivating Faith in Hindu and Buddhist Imagination, a book considering the bountiful and generative metaphorical uses of plants for moral cultivation (propagating, planting, and harvesting; seeds, roots, and fruit). Her research and teaching interests include Hindu and Buddhist history, the genre of historical narrative literature (vaṃsa) in the Pāli language, rhetorical strategies employed in Pāli and Sanskrit texts, the affective domain provoked by religious texts, and (prompted by her past experience with Permaculture) the environmental humanities.