Dr. Ann Gleig

Ann Gleig (R&SAP Leadership Team member) is associate professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Her main research area is Buddhism in America. She is author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), co-editor with Lola Williamson of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism (SUNY Press, 2013). She has published numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Global Buddhism and Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She serves as editor for the Journal of Global Buddhism and as a steering committee member of the Buddhism Group for the American Academy of Religion. She was the grateful recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Alumna Award from the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Rice University where she received training in postcolonial, feminist, and critical theories and pedagogies. In 2017, she won the University Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award at UCF.

Supported Project:

Dr. Ann Gleig and Dr. Amy Paris Langenberg, “Sexual Violation in American Buddhism: Interpretive Frameworks, Emergent Ethics, and Generative Frameworks”

Since the 1980s, American Buddhist convert communities have been the site of reoccurring cases of sexual misconduct and abuse. The widespread nature of these abuses, which have cut across Buddhist lineages, has led to deep questioning as well as painful schisms within American Buddhist communities as they wrestle with the doctrinal, authoritative, and organizational implications. Our collaborative book project, which is under advance contract with Yale University Press, is an attempt to map out, contextualize, and analyze sexual violations in American Buddhism. Combining deep textual work with ethnographic case studies, we explore questions such as: How have Asian Buddhist doctrines and institutions set the terms of sexual abuse in American Buddhist environments? How can we understand the complex religious and socio-cultural contexts that foster environments in which abuse can occur? What specific Buddhist discourses and practices are mobilized around sexual misconduct and the cultures of secrecy that enable it to flourish? How have American Buddhists responded to these violations and what are their generative effects; for instance, what new doctrinal and organizational forms of Buddhism are emerging from them? Our work fills a lacuna in Buddhist Studies scholarship, which has yet to produce any comprehensive scholarship on sexual abuse in classical or contemporary Buddhism.