Liz Wilson

Professor of Comparative Religion, Miami University
Liz Wilson is Professor of Comparative Religion at Miami University of Ohio. She earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago Divinity School, specializing in the History of Religions. Her focus is on the religious history of pre-modern South Asia. Her primary training is in Buddhism, especially Gupta-era narrative literatures of pre-modern India. Her secondary training is in Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, both in South Asia and in diasporic contexts in North America. Wilson’s primary analytical lenses are gender, sexuality, gerontology, and family-formation.

Wilson’s first book _Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature_ (University of Chicago Press, 1996) broke new ground in applying a gender studies lens to pre-modern Buddhist literature and practice in the Indian subcontinent.

The question of how renunciant Buddhists relate to those outside the monastery has been a central preoccupation for Wilson. From this foundation of specialized research, she engages in comparative religious studies, writing about styles of celibacy in different religious and secular communities. She has published on how celibacy contributes to family formation and community building in Buddhist, Christian, and other religious communities that laud the benefits of celibacy and exalt the spiritual work of celibate people. She has delineated instances that bear up the assumption that celibate people have more time to give to those outside their biological families and hence have the potential to build community well. She has explored controversial topics such as the status of out lesbians who choose to be celibate in line with what they regard as central teachings of the Roman Catholic church and the question of whether sexual pleasure is a fundamental human right, as advocated by some in the on-line incel (involuntary celibate) community.

Wilson has written on Buddhist modalities of death and dying. She's compared death rituals across a range of South Asian religions. South Asian vampires are a special interest, especially the undead of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.

Recent work builds on research in South India among Hindus, Christians, and Muslims in Kerala. In this work, Wilson explores questions about asceticism, gender segregation, and male identity formation in a popular South Indian pilgrimage that has historically prohibited reproductive age women. Wilson’s published essays on the topic cover the stand-off between conservative Hindu nationalists and groups advocating for the right of reproductive age women. She’s currently writing an essay that speculates about the extent to which transwomen are already making the pilgrimage and whether other gender queer people may also be allowed to visit the temple that is the culmination of the pilgrimage experience.