Professor Lucinda Ramberg has been awarded a 2020 Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies/ the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation in Buddhist Studies. The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowships in Buddhist Studies offer support for research and writing in Buddhist studies. The fellowship is made possible by a generous grant from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation and provides scholars time free from teaching and other responsibilities to devote full-time to research and writing on their proposed project. Professor Ramberg will take leave in AY 21-22 to complete the manuscript for her current book project, “We Were Always Buddhist”: Dalit Conversion, Sexual Modernity, and the Time of Emancipation. The fieldwork for this manuscript was funded by fellowships from the American Institute for Indian Studies and the Fulbright-Nehru program in Academic and Professional Excellence.
Professor Ramberg shared this abstract for her book project:
“We Were Always Buddhist” investigates the sexual politics of lived Buddhism through an ethnography of religious conversion in contemporary South India. Converts follow the call of B.R. Ambedkar to become Buddhist in order to exit what he called “the hell of Hinduism”. Drawing on 14 months of field research I elaborate the unfolding of emancipation across time and show that, for Ambedkarite Buddhists, emancipation from caste is a project that must be worked out in the past, present, and future. This framework sheds new light on respectability politics in between community uplift and the emancipation of women, illuminates religious conversion as an ongoing process rather than a discrete event, and highlights the epistemological and political particularity of Buddhism in India today.
Congratulations, Professor Ramberg!
