Alicia M. Turner

Alicia Turner is Associate Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies. She is interested in the intersections of religion, colonialism, secularism and nationalism in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Buddhism in Burma (Myanmar) over the past 150 years. Her book Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Hawai'i 2014) explores the fluid nature of the concepts of sāsana, identity and religion through a study of Buddhist lay associations in colonial Burma. She recently published The Irish Buddhist (OUP 2020) with Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking, a biography of an Irish sailor and agitator turned Buddhist monk. She is currently finishing a book on the genealogy of religious difference and conflict in Burma Myanmar.

Representative Publications

Saving Buddhism: Moral Community and the Impermanence of Colonial Religion, Southeast Asia—Politics, Meaning and Memory Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014

“Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?” with Dan Arnold, The New York Times, March 5, 2018. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/opinion/buddhists-violence-tolerance.html

“Pali Scholarship ‘in it Truest Sense’ in Burma: The Multiple Trajectories in Colonial Deployments of Religion.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 77 (1), 2018, pp. 1-16

“Myanmar: Contesting Conceptual Landscapes in the Politics of Buddhism.” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, 19 (March 2016).

“Religion Making and Its Failures: Turning Monasteries into Schools and Buddhism into a Religion in Colonial Burma.” In Markus Dressler and Arvind Mandair (eds.), Secularism and Religion Making. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 226-42.