About

Trent Walker is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Thai at the University of Michigan's Department of Studying Religion. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 2018. His research focuses on Buddhism, literature, and music in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, spanning from the medieval period to the present. He specializes in handwritten materials such as bark-paper documents, palm-leaf manuscripts, and stone inscriptions, and examines their performative realization in speech, chant, and song. Walker has worked extensively with Thai, Khmer, Lanna, Lao, Pali, and Sanskrit sources, and more recently with Tai Khün, Tai Lue, Shan, and Vietnamese sources. His scholarly contributions include authoring 'Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia' and co-editing 'Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages.' His ongoing monograph, 'Classical Reading, Vernacular Writing: A Bitextual History of Southeast Asian Buddhism,' explores the history of Buddhist translation in Southeast Asia, emphasizing the development of bilingual texts and techniques for translating Indic texts, with a focus on manuscript evidence from Thailand and neighboring regions.

Research topics

• Archaeology
• History
• Art
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Linguistics
• Ancient history
• Classics
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Geography

Selected publications

• A Sino‒Thai Blue-and-White Porcelain at UMMA

  Journal of the Siam Society · 2024-05-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A blue-and-white porcelain lidded bottle housed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art stands as a significant representative from a collection of late 19th-century tea sets crafted in China for the Siamese court. This brief examination delves into crucial visual cues, such as the bottle’s distinct ringed-neck shape, incorporation of typical Chinese auspicious motifs, depictions of Siamese coinage and royal monograms from the Rama V period in its decorative patterns, and the presence of a Chinese-language hallmark on its base. These visual elements and inscriptions collectively unveil insights into the bottle’s purpose, origins, and its broader significance within the realm of Sino–Thai ceramics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Living Phonologies: Khmer Pronunciations of Pali at the Nexus of Writing and Orality

  Numen · 2024-04-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract By offering the first detailed portrait of how a particular local system for Pali pronunciation functions, this article aims to renew our appreciation of the complex interaction between chanted sounds and written words in Buddhist cultures. Seated at the fulcrum between orality and writing, the diverse phonologies of Pali are constantly evolving sites of debate over the nature of the voice of the Buddha and his teaching in Theravāda contexts. To give a precise account of how the living complexity of Pali unfolds, the findings in this article are based on the phonetic transcription and analysis of fifteen multimedia recordings of Pali liturgical chants in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cambodia. The range of major and minor variations in Pali pronunciation witnessed during this period, and the contentious debates behind these divergencies, open new paths for understanding the past and present of Pali as a Buddhist language.

  PublisherDOI

• Epiphytic Literatures

  2023-06-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Theravada cultures in mainland Southeast Asia have long cultivated distinct bilingual approaches to translation. Indic-vernacular bitexts, which typically combine portions from a Pali source together with their translation into a Southeast Asian language, dominated the region’s religious, technical, and aesthetic writing between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter explores a botanical metaphor for such bitextual translations, namely plants that are structurally dependent on other plants, including the epiphytes that make Southeast Asian forests appear so lush. Examples explored include those that best demonstrate the epiphytic dimensions of bitexts across several genres in Vietnamese, Shan, Khmer, Lao, and Siamese contexts. These bitexts offer more than a mere translation of their Indic sources; like vines, orchids, or even strangler figs they transform their hosts, whether through processes of abbreviation, expansion, reinterpretation, exegesis, or versification. These complex interactions between Pali hosts and vernacular epiphytes have the capacity to metonymically evoke the distinct historical landscape of how Indic-language scriptures came to be adopted in Southeast Asia.

  PublisherDOI

• Cambodian Literature: An Introduction

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When Cambodians speak of literature, they speak of aksar-sel (Sanskrit aksharashilpa), "the art of letters" and aksar-sah (aksharashastra), "the science of letters." Khmer writers who succeed are celebrated not only for the creative genius of their art but also for their technical mastery over the bewildering variety of forms and genres Cambodian authors have developed.In Khmer, authors are known as neak nipun, literally "those who bind together, " from Sanskrit nibandha, "tying down." The work of composition demands virtuosity in fastening words to one another.In many Cambodian genres, this work of binding involves controlling impressive arrays of linking rhymes and layers of hidden meanings.Even prose authors are tasked with holding together long strings of serial verbs and adjectives, evoking the sonic qualities of assonance and balance so valued in Cambodian poetry.I entered Cambodian literature through the door of sound.My first intensive encounters with its literary forms were as a student of Buddhist chant and poetry recitation in rural Kampong Speu province, Cambodia, for thirteen months from 2005 to 2006.My teachers, lok kru Prum Ut and neak kru Koet Ran, had exacting standards for diction, melody, and moral conduct, and knew that their role as masters of an exceptionally musical form of chant called smot meant instilling such standards in their students.I was only eighteen at the time, fresh out of high school in San Francisco, and was at first a failure in their eyes.I mispronounced the words, put trills and glissandi in the wrong places, and once ran away to a nearby mountain temple when I couldn't stand the pressure of complete immersion in Khmer village life.Despite my transgressions, they took me under their care.Under their tutelage, I repeated short phrases until I got it right or until my throat, irritated by the silty tea we drank out of dimpled beer mugs, simply gave out.In studying with Prum Ut and Koet Ran, I had unwittingly been steeped in the way Cambodian literature had been transmitted for the past fifteen hundred years.Koet Ran, who became blind after the Khmer Rouge period, stressed the oral method alone: she would sing, I would repeat, then she would critique me and sing again.She had memorized well over a hundred chants and had high hopes I would have such a fine memory.But here again I failed,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Liquid Language: The Art of Bitextual Sermons in Middle Cambodia

  Journal of Indian Philosophy · 2022-09-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bilingualism

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  This chapter centers the structures and histories of Indic-vernacular bitexts: bilingual compositions that stitch together portions in an Indic prestige language (usually Pali but also Sanskrit in rare cases) and a local South or Southeast Asian vernacular, such as Arakanese, Burmese, Khmer, Mon, Sinhala, Tamil, Vietnamese, or various Southwestern Tai languages (Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Siamese, etc.), typically in an interphrasal or interlinear arrangement. The first part of the chapter details the three primary steps—selection, analysis, and presentation—in the creation of Theravāda bitexts, based on a comparative study of bilingual compositions across South and Southeast Asia. This practical foundation serves as the basis for the second half of the chapter, which outlines how these techniques gradually developed into a range of bitextual genres in first- and second-millennium Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Theravāda bitexts are much more interconnected across space and time than is commonly assumed. Their shared techniques and historical trajectories bring to life the currents of intellectual and linguistic exchange that have shaped this essentially bilingual religious tradition.

  PublisherDOI

• Khmer Nuns and Filial Debts: Buddhist Intersections in Contemporary Cambodia

  Religions · 2022-09-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Cambodian Buddhist nuns, including the white-robed ṭūn jī, occupy a fraught confluence of competing cultural and religious narratives. Chief among these narratives is gratitude to mothers, among the most powerful structuring forces in Khmer Buddhist culture. By ordaining as nuns, Khmer women break no explicit moral rules, but violate implicit conventions to bear children for their husbands and care for their parents in old age. To explore how this tension plays out in the lives of individual nuns, I draw on public statements and social media posts of two of the most prominent nuns in Cambodia today, Chea Silieng and Heng Kosorl. The two nuns have taken a divergent approach to filial debts, with Silieng emphasizing freedom from her birth family, husband, and children and Kosorl frequently posting about acts of devotion to her parents and grandparents. Both approaches reveal the profoundly gendered dimensions of filial piety and the complex intersection of such narratives with the growing stature of nuns as Buddhist leaders and teachers in Cambodia.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Out of the Shadows of Angkor

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book

  With nearly 400 pages, Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages is an outstanding collection of classic and contemporary writing. The volume emerges from the thirty-year effort of a community to gather Cambodian literary and cultural works. In doing so, they not only translated rare works into English for the first time, but also helped to rescue writing lost during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979). Readers will find the following and more: –Cambodian writing ranging over fourteen hundred years, from the seventh century to the present; –translations of classical texts;selections of modern Cambodian poetry, prose, and folk theater; –contemporary writings by Cambodian refugees and children of the diaspora living in countries from Australia to the United States, Canada, and Europe; –visual art, including oil paintings by Theanly Chov and excerpts from a graphic novel by Tian Veasna. “The work included in Out of the Shadows of Angkor is just a part of the vast, diverse repertoire of Cambodian literature created by those born in Cambodia, in the camps, and in new lands. Soth Polin once told me, ‘What we have lost is indescribable . . . what we have lost is not reconstructable. An epoch is finished. So when we have literature again, it will be a new literature.’ We hope this book brings out of the shadows some of the lost, hidden, and emerging gems of Cambodian literature—past, present, and moving into the future.” —From the overview essay by guest editor Sharon May

  PublisherDOI

• Champa of Battambang

  Mānoa/Mānoa · 2021-01-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Inscription: Warning to Thieves

  Mānoa/Mānoa · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This short inscription from Choeung Ek Monastery in Kandal province, slightly more than a mile north of the contemporary Choeung Ek "Killing Fields" memorial, records the seventh- or eighth-century founding of a Shaivite temple along with a stern warning to any vandals who might steal or disturb what has been donated to it. tw

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Thalia Wheatley

  3 shared

• Yasunori Nomura

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

• Stefano Profumo

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  2 shared

• Danny Marfatia

  University of Hawaii System

  2 shared

• V. Barger

  2 shared

• E. Kearns

  The University of Tokyo

  2 shared

• Y. Kamyshkov

  2 shared

• André de Gouvêa

  Northwestern University

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Group in Buddhist Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  2018