Ray Buckner
Ray Buckner is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His dissertation project, titled “Sensual Materialities: Buddhist Art-Making and Bodily Ethics in Queer and Trans Bangkok,” is an ethnographic study of forty queer and trans Thai Buddhist artists in Bangkok who cultivate a more expansive Buddhism by reworking the religion’s aesthetics, materialities, and philosophies in their art-making processes. Examining artistic innovations with monastic robes, living flowers, rope, and images of the Buddha, among other materials and objects, Ray argues that by working with Buddhist materiality, these artists create new bonds of relationship to their bodies and to Buddhist teachings. Ray is currently a Buffett Research Fellow at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. He was also awarded a Khyentse Foundation PhD Scholarship and a Buffett International Research Award to support his dissertation research.
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 a Buddhist community in the United States that minimized complaints of sexual violence against its founding teacher. Ray’s academic research is published in The Journal of Global Buddhism, Religions, The Revealer, American Religion, and Pacific World Journal, and is forthcoming in CrossCurrents, Mormon Studies Review, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the History of Sexuality, and 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.