Established in 2018 and formerly known as the William Levman Scholarship, this award is made to one or more MA or PhD students in the Department for the Study of Religion (DSR) who is/are studying Buddhist Studies, with a focus on Pali or Theravada Buddhism.
The generosity of Buddhist Studies/DSR alumnus Bryan Levman, together with Rosi Levman, has created this endowed Bill and Belle Levman Graduate Award.
The University of Toronto is the only academic institution in Canada that regularly conducts Pali courses and one of the few in North America in which the language is taught at all. A central goal of the DSR is to foster growth in Buddhist studies research and teaching. The Bill and Belle Levman Graduate Award is a significant and timely contribution to that aim, while simultaneously supporting the transformative power of language study.
2024 Recipient
Ian Turner is a DSR doctoral candidate examining how people build homes and domesticate spaces according to the religious concerns of themselves and their communities. In particular, he 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.
2023 Recipient
Andrew Dade is a PhD candidate in the DSR with interests in the historiography of Buddhism, modern South/Southeast Asia and the intersections of religion, media and law.
2022 Recipient
A DSR PhD candidate, Andrea Wollein’s research interests are in Newar, Tibetan, and Theravāda Buddhism, and in ethnography and biography. Her dissertation explores Buddhist traditions in Nepal through the case study of Yampi Mahāvihāra (Ī Bahī) in Patan, a Newar Buddhist monastery (Skt. vihāra) known as E yi gtsug lag khang in Tibetan, which features a unique constellation of Newar Vajrayāna, Newar Theravāda as well as Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Utilizing ethnographic and textual research to engage with the site, she employs materiality as a lens to understand dynamic aspects of vihāra culture and to trace novel developments.
2019-20 and 2020-21 Recipient (William Levman Scholarship)
Zhinan Jiang is an MA student at the Department for the Study of Religion where she also received her BA. Her research focuses on Buddhist cosmology with a special interest in contextualization of Pali cosmography and astronomy manuscript from Burma. More generally, she is interested in the scientific Buddhist literature in the Pañcavidyā.
