About
Historian of religion and law in South and Southeast Asia, using Sanskrit texts and inscriptions in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Old Javanese, and Classical Tamil. I study the formation and spread of Brahmanical ideals and institutions in the ancient and early medieval periods.
Head of the Law, Justice, and Society Program at WLU
National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 2020–21
American Council for Learned Societies fellow, 2020–21 Education
BA Columbia, MTS Harvard, PhD Columbia. Mastodon Feed
At the 235th Meeting, we voted to continue our work under a new name: the American Society for Premodern Asia. We invite all scholars who work on languages, literatures, history, and material culture of West, Central, South, and East Asia, and North Africa join us! https://bsky.app/profile/aspa1842.bsky.social/post/3lmo5rycwgk2g #ancient #medieval #asia (2025-04-13 ↗)
Works from the series "After Audubon" and "Watershed" ( https://laurestevenslubin.com/series/after-audubon–abiding-in-the-anthropocene ) are on view at The Branch Museum in Richmond, Va. for the next three months as part of the exhibition "Re-Think Landscape Design": https://branchmuseum.org/re-think-landscape-design/ (2025-03-02 ↗)
Our chapter on status and family in the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law, which came out last fall. This collaborative volume, long in the works, seeks to expand the scope of ancient legal history and to think hard about what comparative history can accomplish. | https://www.academia.edu/127810712/Status_and_Family (2025-02-22 ↗)
WLU's unique interdisciplinary Law Justice & Society Program profiled today: https://columns.wlu.edu/minor-focus-law-justice-and-society/ #law #justice #society (2024-11-22 ↗)
Looking forward to the conference on "The Problem of Eurocentrism in Global Diplomatic History," Stockholm Univ, 23-24 Jan 2025, a collaboration btw the Global Diplomacy Network & the Hans Blix Centre for the History of IR. Keynote speaker is @aysezarakol : https://www.su.se/english/research/research-groups/global-diplomacy-network/conference-the-problem-of-eurocentrism-in-global-diplomatic-history-1.766480 (2024-11-18 ↗)
Projects
The Authority of the Brahmins
Part I. The Invention of Brahmanical Dharma.
A study of the use of ascetical disciplinary practices to configure Brahmins as religious professionals comparable to Buddhist and Jaina mendicants, equally deserving of veneration and patronage though they “remain in the home”; this model, developed in the centuries spanning the Maurya to Gupta dynasties, provided a framework for promoting ethical and legal norms that became widely influential, and served to confer status and authority.
Part II. The Expanding Orbit of Dharma’s Authority: Appropriations on the Peripheries
A study of the institutional and political mechanisms by which a Brahmin priestly elite succeeded in translating its religious authority into a vehicle for social, legal, and cultural influence between the 1st c. and the 12th c. CE.
Editions and studies of Sanskrit and Old Javanese texts on religious law. Upcoming Talks and Conferences
“Governmentality in Early India and the Question of the Nonmodern State,” 234th Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society, Chicago, 21–25 March 2024.
“
The Exemption that Proves the Rule: Reading Law Between the Lines of Medieval South Asian Foundation Charters,” Thomas R. Trautmann Honorary Lecture 2024, Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 15 March 2024.
“Clauses Carried on the Currents,” invited paper, Workshop “At the ‘Margins’ of the Indic World: Connections, innovations, and archaisms from Nepal to Bali,” EFEO/Maison de la Recherche, Paris, 8–9 January 2024.
Memberships
AOS (director-at-large, 2015–2018, 2020-2023), American Academy of Religion, International Association of Sanskrit Studies (regional director for the U.S. and Canada, 2018–2025), Association for Asian Studies, North American Association for the Study of Religion, Pali Text Society
