Anne Blackburn
Professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian Studies
Anne M. Blackburn is a historian of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism. She is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. Blackburn received her B.A. in Asian History and Religion in 1988 from Swarthmore College, her M.A. in Religious Studies in 1990 from University of Chicago Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in History of Religions in 1996 from the same institution. Blackburn's teachers include Steven Collins, Charles Hallisey, Frank E. Reynolds, and Donald Swearer.
Research
Blackburn is currently working on a new project, "Monks, Texts, and Relics: A History of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia". This study aims to examine the Buddhist monastic networks and temple formation in British colonial port cities.
Selected publications
Books
Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Approaching the Dhamma: Buddhist Texts and Practices in South and Southeast Asia. ed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Anne Blackburn” is professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian Studies. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anne, Blackburn and Professor, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian Studies” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4768168. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1990, 1996 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anne Blackburn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.