Area
South Asian Religions; Pilgrimage; Narrative Ethics; Comparison in Religious Studies
About
Kevin Poe is a Ph.D. student specializing in South Asian Religions. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from The College of Wooster in 2023, with a double major in Philosophy and Religious Studies and a minor in South Asian Studies. He received his Master of Arts in Divinity from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2025. Since 2021, Kevin has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand, examining lived narrative ethics among Theravāda monastic communities, as well as in Bodh Gaya and Varanasi, India, where he explored the role of narrative in the ethical lives of pilgrims. In 2024, he completed a comparative research project on pilgrimage experiences in Bodh Gaya and Varanasi, culminating in a thesis titled “Where All Stories End: Time, Karma, and Narrative in Northern Indian Buddhist and Hindu Pilgrimage.” His current research is focused on the history of northern Indian pilgrimage and, broadly, how moral imaginations are prefigured through textual, material, and oral forms of narrative across diverse South Asian traditions.
Research Languages: Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi, French