My work focuses on the histories of sex, gender, and ethnography in the highlands of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. My first book project, “Manly Encounters,” examines how ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the earliest generation of professional American anthropologists was intertwined with their attempts to perform (to varying degrees of success) their approximation …
I am a historian of religion with research interests in the history of Buddhist ethical ideas and modern religious reform and social justice movements in Southeast Asia, Cold War Buddhism, colonial Buddhism, and religion and visual culture. Much of my work focuses on Buddhist ethics of care and/or “local” interpretations and expressions of Theravada Buddhist …
After earning a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at Yale, my writing on this region has focused on three topics — the history of modern empires, Philippine political history and global opium trafficking. My first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. …