Olivia Porter

Profile

My research focuses primarily on Tai Buddhism practiced by communities living in the Myanmar-China borderlands.

In 2023 I completed my PhD at King’s College London, which coupled ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar with traditional textual approaches to explore the Tai Zawti, a little-known (and at times underground) Tai Theravada Buddhist tradition founded in the seventeenth century. The Zawti are closely associated with the Tai ethnic group known as the Shan in Myanmar, the Dai in China, and the Tai Yai in Thailand, who live in the borderlands of mainland Southeast Asia, southwestern China and northeastern India.

Before this, I did my undergraduate degree in Sanskrit with Pali at the University of Oxford and my master’s degree in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Policial Science.

Before joining Leeds as a teaching fellow, I was a visiting lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of Roehampton and a seminar tutor at the University of Oxford.

Research interests

My research approach is textual and ethnographic which reflects my background in classical languages (Sanskrit and Pali) and social anthropology. My current research interests include Pali-vernacular mix literature, specifically a genre of Tai literature called lik long and zares, the practitioners who disseminate this type of literature to the community through oral recitation. I am currently working on a project that examines parivāsa (monastic probation) and another on the role of Tai pop music in the dissemination of Buddhism among cross-border communities.

More broadly, I am interested in pre-reform Theravada Buddhism and what ‘minority’ Buddhist communities, traditions, and texts can teach us about the development of contemporary Buddhism.

Qualifications

• PhD Theology and Religious Studies (King's College London)
• MSc Social Anthropology (LSE)
• BA Sanskrit with Pali (University of Oxford)