MK Long

Visiting Lecturer on Women's Studies and South Asian Religions
MK Long headshot

Home Institution

Dartmouth College

WSRP Project

Between Buddhas: Scenes of Belonging in Burmese Biography

Buddhist women in Myanmar are typically excluded from the terms and spaces of religious authority. By offering the first English translations of their biographical writings in Burmese, Long shows how Buddhist laywomen and nuns have overcome challenges of recognition by building their own institutional spaces and voicing authority and belonging in their own terms.

Profile

MK Long is a historian and ethnographer of Buddhism and gender. Her current project highlights vernacular auto/biographical writings of Buddhist women in Myanmar, examining their rhetorical strategies of self-presentation and how they theorize Buddhist authority, temporality, and belonging. Long's study of vernacular literature of the 1980s-90s foregrounds its conditions of production, not only its relationship to Buddhist biographical and narrative traditions, but also authoritarian censorship, state-driven reorganization of monastic institutions, and shifting citizenship regimes. This work is shaped and informed by Long's ethnographic fieldwork in a large, mission-oriented nunnery in downtown Yangon, Myanmar, and its network of branch nunneries throughout the country.

 

Long's research has drawn support from the Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA), and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, awarded through the American Council of Learned Societies.