DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Ray Buckner is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His dissertation, titled “Buddhist Material Intimacies: Contemporary Art, Politics, and Religion in Queer and Trans Bangkok,” examines how thirty queer and trans artists in Bangkok re-work their relationships to Thai Buddhism, gender and sexuality, the Bangkok government, and the natural environment through art-making. Through a focus on flower artists, fashion designers, shibari rope artists, painters, and filmmakers, Ray’s project introduces how queer and trans artists cultivate intimate and non-conventional relationships with Buddhist materiality, transforming both their own relationships to the Buddhist path and the contemporary Thai art scene itself. Ray is currently a Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. He was previously a Buffett Research Fellow at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and a recipient of a Khyentse Foundation PhD Scholarship and a Buffett International Research Award.

Before joining Northwestern, Ray earned his MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University where he wrote his thesis on sexual violence in American Buddhism. Ray’s academic research is published in The Journal of Global Buddhism, Crosscurrents, Religions, The Revealer, American Religion, and Pacific World Journal, and is forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the History of Sexualityand The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary Buddhist Ethics.

In his free time, Ray writes personal essays exploring themes of gender transition, trans rights, domestic violence, and race, publishing articles in Lion’s Roar Magazine, Buddhadharma, Open Minds Magazine, and BuddhistDoor Global. Ray’s advisor is Robert Orsi.