Kristin Scheible
Professor of Religion and Humanities
Email | 503-517-5323
Buddhism, Hinduism.
BA 1994 Colby College.
MTS 1997 Harvard Divinity School.
PhD 2006 Harvard University.
Reed College 2014–.
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.
Research Interests
Buddhism and Hinduism
South Asian religious literature
Rhetorical strategies in Pāli and Sanskrit texts
Emotions, ethics, gender(ed) images, non-human characters
Theories and articulations of divine presence
Buddhist history and historical narrative literature (vamsas) in Pāli
Courses
Rel 131 – Introduction to Hinduism
Rel 132 – Introduction to South Asian Buddhism
Rel 201 – Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion
Rel 331 – Lives of the Buddha
Rel 333 – Arousing Faith in Hinduism and Buddhism
Rel 334 – Gender and Buddhism
Rel 335 – South Asian Religious Nationalisms
Rel 336 – Buddhist Ethics
Rel 374 – Entanglement: Environment, Ethics & Religion