Christoph Emmrich

Christoph Emmrich (PhD University of Heidelberg, 2004) engages with fields as diverse as Nepalese and Burmese Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Newar, Burmese and Mon literature and Tamil Jainism. He works with girl children, young women and ritual specialists among the Newars in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) and in Yangon, Mandalay, and Mawlamyine (Burma) studying their involvement in Buddhist practices related to marriage, education, monastic ordination and the consecration of images. He confronts the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals, poetry, and modern novels in Newar, Nepali, Sanskrit, or Burmese, covering the period between the early 17th century and the present, with the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events. Christoph Emmrich further works on on the historiography of Tamil Digambara Jain literature, temple ritual, and education in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India). In his work he addresses questions of resemblance and resistance, transfer and translation, mimesis and memory.