Photo of Sarah Richardson

Sarah Richardson

Title/Position
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream (Continuing)
Historical Studies - History of Religions
  • Room:
    MN 4208
  • Office Hours:
    Please refer to the syllabus and/or contact via email.
  • Mailing Address:

    3359 Mississauga Road, Maanjiwe nendamowinan, 4th Floor
    Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
    Canada

Biography:

Sarah Aoife Richardson is a historian of the arts and religions of South Asia with a specialization in Buddhist visual and material practice, especially Himalayan painting. Sarah is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the History of Religions for the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

She especially enjoys teaching and learning about the ways that the arts are used in religious contexts, and how the arts move(d) people and helped to build communities. She is passionate about finding ways to help students experience and learn through the arts in her courses. In 2020 she was awarded the UTM Teaching Excellence Award for Sessional Instructors.

Sarah is working on a book length study about Visual Words in Tibetan Architecture, which is an in-depth study of the rich program of inscribed murals at an important fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery called Shalu (Zhalu). Mural paintings, Sarah argues, were then (and are still) useful in larger cultural projects of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge production and social communication. She also extends her scholarly practice to the museum, and has researched for years the largely unpublished Tibetan paintings collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (ROM).

Education:

PhD (University of Toronto)

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