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Getting to Know New Faculty
Meet Dr. Tyler A. Lehrer, Assistant Professor of History
University News | September 27, 2024
Dr. Lehrer grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, just east of Sacramento. After working as a manager with FedEx for nearly a decade, his educational journey began as a community college student before transferring to California State University, Sacramento, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 2013. From there, he moved to the shadow of another mountain range— the Rockies— where he completed a Master’s degree in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2016. His research and initial publications focused on controversial ordinations for Buddhist nuns in modern Sri Lanka, situating contested movements to expand the ordination of Buddhist women at the nexus of gendered forms of religious piety, global feminisms, and ethno-nationalist politics.
Lehrer completed his doctoral degree in South and Southeast Asian history earlier this year at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation and first book project consider the Dutch East India Company's involvement in helping to maintain, and later exploit, maritime religious linkages between Buddhist kingdoms in what are now Thailand and Sri Lanka between the 1690s and 1760s.
"Fundamentally, my research and the kinds of questions I find most compelling are about the enduring centrality of religious lineages to the exercise of political power in the Buddhist cultures of South and Southeast Asia, but I'm also excited to branch out into new territory in the years ahead to explore how evolving gender and sexual norms were constructed and regulated by European colonial states in the early modern Indian Ocean."
At Virginia Wesleyan, Lehrer is enthusiastic about teaching classes in world history, Asian history, and gender and women's history— classes much smaller than the ones he taught at UW–Madison—as well as really getting to know what his students are most curious about.
"I think history gives us a really powerful set of tools to investigate how the world around us got to be the way it is, and at the same time, to connect the things we're curious about to a set of critical methods and research skills which are deeply relevant to virtually any career path you can name."
A strong believer in the transformative value of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary liberal arts and sciences education, he’s is also excited about opportunities to teach classes that appeal to and draw from multiple disciplines across the social sciences and humanities at VWU, especially Religious Studies and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, as vital avenues for history.
When he's not preparing for classes, Lehrer enjoys getting outside to explore Hampton Roads' diverse coastlines and trail running through the trees; hunting used bookstores to add to his "to be read" collection of modern classic literature; travelling anywhere and everywhere (but especially India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Netherlands); and cooking and eating together with friends and colleagues.