Juliane Schober
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Phone: 480-727-8027
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Coor 4th floor TEMPE, AZ 85287-4302
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Mail code: 4302Campus: Tempe
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Juliane Schober (PhD., University of Illinois, 1989) is Professor of Religious Studies and an anthropologist of religion, working primarily on Myanmar Buddhist formations and the Theravada Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia. She has served as Director of the Asia Center at ASU since 2011. In her role as Co-Director of the Religious Studies Graduate program (2009-12), she developed a doctoral track in the anthropology of religion.
She has held leadership positions in the Association for Asian Studies, the American Academy of Religion, and in the American Anthropological Association. Her work has been supported by more than 30 grants and fellowships, totaling $4.3 million from organizations like The Robert N. H. Ho Foundation/ACLS, The Henry Luce Foundation, SSRC, NEH, the Smithsonian Institution, Wenner-Gren, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and others. She was Principal Investigator on Title VI grants (NRC, FLAS and UISFL). She was PI on multiple Title VI grants (NRC, FLAS and UISFL). She serves on several editorial boards and as a Trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation and on the Academic Board of the Inya Institute, Yangon, Myanmar.
With support from the Henry Luce Foundation, Professor Schober developed a collaborative project on Theravada Buddhist Civilizations in Southeast Asia. This project brought together international scholars to chart new directions in this field and organized annual workshops for dissertation writers. In 2014, she founded the Theravada Studies Group, an academic organization affiliated with the Association for Asian Studies. that promotes comparative and scholarly exchanges in the social sciences and humanities about Theravada Buddhist traditions in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Southwest China and globally though pilgrimage and diaspora networks.
Her areas of research include Theravada Buddhist practices in Southeast Asia, especially Myanmar (Burma), Anthropology of Religion; Material Culture, Media and Aesthetics; Icons; Ritual; Modernity, Politics and Religion; Colonial Studies; Conflict and Civil Society; Theravada Buddhism; and Sacred Biography. She published 4 books and more than 40 articles, delivered over 70 invited lectures, and organized numerous conferences and panels. Her publications can be accessed on Academia and her citations can be viewed on Google. Her book, "Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society," was published in 2011 (University of Hawai’i Press). She is editor of "Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia" (1997) and co-edited Buddhist Manuscript Cultures (2008) and Theravada Buddhist Encounters with Modernity (2018).
- Ph.D. University of Illinois-Urbana 1989
- M.A. University of Illinois-Urbana 1980
- B.A. University of Northern Colorado 1976
