Faculty Profiles

faculty photo imageKristin Scheible

Professor of Religion and Humanities
Religion Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Kristin Scheible is a scholar of South Asian Religions. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and B.A. from Colby College. Her research interests include Theravāda Buddhist history, the genre of historical narrative literature (vaṃsa) in the Pāli language, rhetorical strategies employed in Pāli and Sanskrit texts, and the affective domain provoked by religious texts. Her first book, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History (Columbia University Press, 2016), explores the work-like dimension of the fifth century Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa, and destabilizes the dominant reading of this text as a political charter. In 2014, after ten years at Bard College, she enthusiastically returned home to Portland to join the Reed faculty and raise her three kids under Douglas firs. She is a member of the Hum 110 faculty, and teaches courses in Buddhism, Hinduism, emotion and the arousal of faith, gender and South Asian religious nationalisms.


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