Researcher of the Month, February 2026: Dr Olivia Porter

Photo courtesy of Dr Olivia Porter

Dr Olivia Porter is a Teaching Fellow in Religious Studies in the School of PRHS at the University of Leeds, a Research Associate at the SOAS Centre for Buddhist Studies, and a member of the CRPL. She works primarily on Tai (Shan) Buddhism practiced by communities living in the Myanmar-China borderlands.

Tell us a little about your research journey. How did you get to where you are right now?

My research journey began through studying languages and texts during my undergraduate degree, specifically Sanskrit and Pali, the textual languages of Hinduism and Buddhism. Reading Pali texts opened my eyes to a whole new Buddhist world that contrasted quite significantly from my own experiences of Buddhism as a lived religion in Asia. I grew up visiting my family in Penang in Malaysia, a place where religion is visible on every street corner in the form of guardian spirit shrines and where Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu temples are on the same road as mosques and churches. It’s a place where you can listen to a monk give a dhamma talk, worship Ganesha, and watch a Taoist spirit medium being possessed over a long afternoon. For me there was a disconnect between the canonical texts I was reading in my formal study of religion and the ‘lived’ religion that I had observed. I wanted to know how these texts were understood and negotiated by Buddhists in their everyday lives which led me to pursuing a master’s in Social Anthropology where I learned about how ethnographic practices could enrich textual study.

I was interested, and continue to be interested in, the relationship between text and practice, specifically in terms of how ritual is understood and enacted by practitioners, and also in terms of how this relationship shapes the perceived ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘legitimacy’ of certain actors and actions. When I began my PhD, I wanted to learn more about lay ritual practitioners and their role in Theravada Buddhism, specifically Tai (Shan) lay ritual practitioners called zare who are masters of a complex textual tradition called lik long. When I got to Myanmar to conduct fieldwork, I went to a village in southern Shan State to listen to some zares recite lik long, but when I got there nobody there could recite the texts and I was told to go to another nearby village where there were people that could. When I arrived at the next village there were things that stood out, firstly the men and women sat on separate sides of the small Buddhist temple which I was not used to seeing in ‘mainstream’ Buddhist temples and crucially, they were reciting chants from a book published by the Tai Zawti monastery. I learned that this was a Tai Zawti village, belonging to a Theravada Buddhist group that had been underground for long periods of time on account of their perceived ‘heretical practices’ and was thought to have disappeared. The Tai Zawti Buddhist community became the subject of my PhD research, and it is only since finishing my PhD that I’ve returned to the zare and the lik long textual tradition that initially orientated me towards Tai Buddhism. After finishing my PhD in 2023 I lectured at the University of Roehampton and the University of Oxford and joined Leeds as a teaching fellow in 2025.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on writing up a monograph based on my PhD thesis. It will be the first academic volume dedicated to the elusive Tai Zawti Buddhist community, most of whom are members of the Tai ethnic minority group known as the Shan in Myanmar. The monograph will build on the PhD thesis by centring the role of the Tai Zawti zare in the preservation and transmission of Tai Buddhism among the wider Tai community in the Myanmar-China borderlands. I have also started a new project centred around parivāsa (monastic probation). Currently I am looking at Tai and Burmese parivāsa manuscripts, but I hope to complement this textual study with fieldwork to explore how parivāsa is practised (and how this has changed) among contemporary Tai monks in Myanmar and Thailand.

How does your work relate to some aspect of religion and public life?

My PhD research examined the Tai Zawti, a Theravada Buddhist group that remained hidden to outsiders, to public life, for extended periods of time. My investigation of the Tai Zawti explored a long history of strategies to avoid centralized control and persecution, emerging back into public life only at opportune moments that were deemed safe and necessary. I am interested in how this has allowed the Tai Zawti to preserve features of Theravada Buddhism that have been lost elsewhere and how the group have negotiated reintegrating back into public life through absorption into the wider Sangha in Myanmar. In this way, I’m interested in the interplay between the private and public in the dissemination of Tai Buddhism and how it is situated within the wider context of the Myanmar-China borderlands. It is a place where religion plays an integral role in everyday life, through daily rituals to what livelihoods people choose to do, and crucially it is central to how ethnic and national identity are negotiated in the frontier zone area.

My ongoing research on Tai Buddhism focuses closely on Tai Buddhist lay ritual practitioners called zares, public facing actors who disseminate Buddhism among the Tai community through their recitation of lik long texts. I focus specifically on the ‘vernacular’ nature of these Buddhist lik long texts and how they complement and enrich our understanding of traditional ‘canonical’ Pali Buddhist texts which have traditionally been the focus of western academic scholarship. My intention is to actively bridge the perceived gap that exists between ‘traditional’ and ‘academic’ ways of knowing and to highlight how it is through the dissemination of such texts that Buddhism is preserved and maintained. By drawing on Tai manuscript material housed in UK institutions I hope to also show that Tai religion and culture has a presence in UK public life, one intertwined with the legacy of British colonialism in Burma and its borders, which has been overlooked for numerous reasons but offers us important insights into the socio-cultural history of the region.