معرفی
Trent Walker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, specializing in Southeast Asian Buddhism, literature, and music. He holds a PhD in Buddhist Studies from UC Berkeley (2018) and completed postdoctoral work at Chulalongkorn University and Stanford’s Ho Center for Buddhist Studies.
His research focuses on handwritten Buddhist materials (bark-paper documents, palm-leaf manuscripts, stone inscriptions) from Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, analyzing their performative roles in chanting, ritual, and oral transmission. Key projects include the in-progress monograph Classical Reading, Vernacular Writing: A Bitextual History of Southeast Asian Buddhism and co-curating the Buddhist Digital Resource Center’s 2 million-page manuscript database.
- 2024 Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation
- Authored Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (2022)
- Co-edited Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (2022)
- Developed digital tools for Lao, Shan, Thai, and Tham script input
Walker teaches courses on Theravada Buddhism, Southeast Asian literature, Buddhist magic, and translation studies, with previous teaching experience at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Chulalongkorn University. His work bridges academia and cultural preservation through collaborations on Cambodian genocide memorialization (e.g., Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia).
