Carol Anderson, Religion Department Chair
Associate Professor of Religion
269-337-7114
anderson@kzoo.edu

Dr. Anderson's research and teaching focus on two primary areas of interest: Buddhism and religions of South Asia, and feminist studies of religion. She teaches courses in the religious traditions of South Asia and courses that explore the methodological questions of how to study religions comparatively. She also teaches courses in the Women's Studies program, and has served as the director of that program. As a recipient of a Fulbright Research grant to Sri Lanka in 1990-1991, she returns to South Asia on a regular basis. She received a summer research grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities in 1999.

Her first book, published by Curzon Press (1999), is titled Pain and its Ending: The Four Noble Truths in the Theravada Buddhist Canon. It is a study of the Buddhist teaching of the four truths in the Theravada Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka. The book argues that the doctrine of the four noble truths is a symbol in the canon as well as an intellectual proposition about the nature of truth. She has published articles on feminist approaches to the study of religion in The Graceful Guru: Encountering Female Hindu Gurus in India and the United States, edited by Karen Pechilis (Oxford Press 2004) and in Feminist Theology: Journal of the Britain and Ireland School. She has also published work on a Buddhist handbook written in late 19th century Sri Lanka on how lay Buddhists should be Buddhist (Constituting Communities: Theravada Traditions and Religious Cultures in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Holt, Kinnard, and Walters, SUNY Press, 2003).

She has extensive service to the American Academy of Religion, as a chair of the Comparative Studies in Religion section (1997-2000) and as a member of the American Academy of Religion Board, elected by the Midwest Region (2000-2006). She has been chair of the Department of Religion at Kalamazoo College since 2005.

Education
B.A., University of Puget Sound (1980)
M.A., The University of Chicago Divinity School (1982)
Ph.D., The University of Chicago Divinity School (1994)