Alexandra Kaloyanides is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Kaloyanides served as Managing Editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and currently serves as editor of the Asian Traditions section of Marginalia Review of Books, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel.
Her book is titled Objects of Conversion, Relics of Resistance: Materials of Religious Change at the American Baptist Mission to Burma, and it illuminates little-known histories of Burma’s last kingdom and America’s first foreign mission. Throughout the nineteenth-century American Baptist mission to Burma, Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism while minority communities were baptized in astonishing numbers. And American Baptist Christianity also found itself changed. This book traces four key objects—the sacred book, the school house, the pagoda, and the portrait—to show Burma not as a simple country of unified Buddhists defending themselves against a monolithic Western enemy, but rather as a site of multiple clashing and remade religious worlds.
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