Amy Langenberg

Degrees

• • Ph.D., Columbia University
  • M.A., Columbia University
  • B.A., Harvard University

Courses Taught

• Animals and Religion
• Asian Religions and the Environment
• Buddhism and Sexuality
• Engaged Buddhism
• Gender, Activism, and Religion
• Hindu Myth and Ritual
• History of Yoga
• Religion, Power, and Difference
• Thinking Global Sex (an FYE)

Biography

Amy Paris Langenberg is a specialist in classical South Asian Buddhism with a focus on monasticism, gender, sexuality, and the body. She also conducts ethnographic research on contemporary Buddhist feminisms, contemporary female Buddhist monasticism, and, more recently, sexual abuse in American Buddhism. She is currently interested in how notions of agency, autonomy, freedom, and consent function in contemporary religious communities, and the role of affect, the body, and emotion in religious life.

Professor Langenberg’s monograph, Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom was published by Routledge in 2017 as part of Critical Studies in Buddhism series (read review). In addition, she has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, History of Religions, Religions, Religion Compass, and the Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics. Her current project is a collaborative book on generative responses to sexual abuse in American Buddhism, to be co-written with Ann Gleig (University of Central Florida) and published with Yale University Press. Professors Gleig and Langenberg recently received a Henry H. Luce Foundation Award for this research project.

Professor Langenberg is also the inaugural Faculty Director of the Eastman Citizenship and Leadership Program, a selective program designed for students who want to connect their education to questions of justice and social engagement.