Trent Walker
Trent Walker
Trent Walker
- Academic Development CommitteeCommittee Member
Trent Walker is a member of KF’s Academic Development Committee, which focuses on grants and partnerships with universities around the world. As part of this committee, he also helps to organize and host the monthly Goodman Lectures, which showcase some of the Buddhist Studies scholars that KF works with around the globe.
Trent was the Khyentse Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is currently the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies Postdoctoral Fellow and a lecturer in Religious Studies at Stanford University. He earned his PhD in Buddhist Studies from UC Berkeley in 2018. He is also the Director of Preservation and Lead Scholar for the Khmer Manuscript Heritage Project, a large-scale digitization initiative led by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center and funded by A Khmer Buddhist Foundation. His publications focus on Buddhist music, literature, and translation in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
I deeply admire KF’s nonsectarian approach to supporting Buddhist scholarship and practice. As a teenager, I spent five months as a novice monk in Cambodia and trained for several years in Khmer chanting techniques. I’m very fortunate to have regular opportunities to perform for ritual and cultural functions in Southeast Asia and the United States. In my teaching and research work, I’m particularly drawn to projects that make Southeast Asia’s Buddhist heritage more accessible to communities in the region and in diaspora.