Description: Dr. Lehrer’s talk explores 18th-century Buddhist diplomacy across the Indian Ocean, tracing how Kandyan envoys and Ayutthayan monks journeyed aboard Dutch ships in search of religious renewal. Through storms, shipwrecks, and diplomacy, he reveals how sacred travel was deeply perilous, transactional, and shaped by political and moral entanglements.
Speaker Bio: Tyler A. Lehrer (he/him)—an alum of SASLI (Sinhala, 2014 and 2015) and of UW–Madison (PhD, History, 2024)—is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan University. His primary research, publication, and teaching areas encompass the history of South and Southeast Asian Buddhist lineages, European seaborne empires, transregional and transnational religious and political movements in the global south, and gender and sexual normativity in the early modern Indian Ocean.
