Projects
- The Cambridge Platonists at the origins of Enlightenment: texts, debates, and reception (1650-1730). CI David Leech (2016-19, Cambridge University Lead, total £666,777 and Bristol, £267,392.00). This study looks at the neglected Cambridge Platonists, the most important school of Platonic philosophers between the Italian Renaissance and the Romantic Age, whose leading members were Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83), Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), Henry More (1614-1687) and John Smith (1618-1652). One of the aims of the project is to produce a digital 'Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook', subdivided into three broad sections - Nature and God; Knowledge and Belief; Human Beings and Morality.
- BA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2016 - Susannah Deane - Madness, mental health and Buddhism: an examination of smyo nad ('madness') in the Tibetan context. PI Rupert Gethin (2017-20, £256,998.00).
Susannah Deane: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Susannah Deane was awarded a British Academy three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in 2017 for her project, ‘Madness, mental health and Buddhism: an examination of smyo nad (‘madness’) in the Tibetan context’, within the Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol, and she is currently working on a monograph based on this research. The research encompasses ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2018 and 2019 in the Tibetan region of Amdo within Qinghai province, China, alongside an examination of Tibetan religious and medical texts. It explores how Tibetan Tantric and medical notions of mind and body interrelate in diverse and complex ways to explain causative explanations of ‘madness’ focused on spirit affliction, ‘incorrect’ Tantric practice, and ‘heart-wind’ illnesses, with treatment often focused on ritual intervention and the activities of religious – rather than medical – specialists.
Susannah completed her BA(Hons) in Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor in 1999, before studying and working in the field of alternative health for several years. Returning to academic study, Susannah received her MA in Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol in 2008, before studying Modern Tibetan language at Tibet University in Lhasa in 2009-10, and commencing her PhD in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University. A monograph based on this work, entitled ‘Tibetan Medicine, Buddhism and psychiatry: mental health and healing in a Tibetan exile community’, was published in 2018 with Carolina Academic Press.
- Catholic doctrines about Judaism after the second Vatican council, 1965–2015. PI Gavin D’Costa. Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2017-18, £20,416.00). Analysis of doctrines of the Catholic magisterium regarding the Jewish people after the Second Vatican Council during the period 1965-2015.
- Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship. PI Rupert Gethin (2016-17, £42,169.00). Abhidharma is one of the most sustained attempts in the history of human thought to analyse the workings of the mind. This study considers Buddhist systematic thought as formulated in the Abhidharma using sources in Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese (many of which have never been translated into a European language) from a comparative perspective.
- Feeding Humans and Non-Humans in Theravada Buddhism. PI Rita Langer, BA Small Grant (2014, £5884). This project studies the relationship in a series of mini documentaries in mixed medium (film, stills, sounds) of the relationship between humans and non-humans in Southeast Asia by way of food offerings or feasts, which are prepared in the still largely female domain of the kitchens.