Ian Turner

Ian Turner is a doctoral candidate interested in how people build homes and domesticate spaces according to the religious concerns of themselves and their communities. In particular, Ian is researching how the Newar community in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley have drawn on indigenous traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism throughout recent decades of modernisation, liberalisation and crisis, to work out questions of identity, individual ethics, and sociality. Ian is interested in how houses and home-spaces become key literal and ideological sites through the print publications of Newar intellectuals and the everyday practices of householders. Other research interests include twentieth century Newar Buddhist literary history, the role of food in Newar Vajrāyāna Buddhist ritual, and the use of Newar-language primers for children in cultivating specific values and subjectivities. Ian is also invested in conversations on the methodological and theoretical infrastructure of religious studies, questions he looks forward to interrogating in 2021/22 through his first co-taught undergraduate course, Introduction to the Study of Religion.