Frederik Schröer is a historian of 19th and 20th-century South Asia. His work focuses on the history of Buddhism in South Asia and Tibet, on the history of migration (particularly the Tibetan diaspora), environmental history, and the history of emotions. His current research focuses on conceptions of nature and human-environment relations among Buddhist reformers and related religious movements in late colonial India. Further research interests include the history of concepts, philology, critical posthumanism and new materialism.

Schröer defended his PhD on the role of emotions in the early Tibetan diaspora in India at the Freie University Berlin in 2020. With a background in Tibetan and Buddhist, South Asian and Chinese studies (Mag. Phil., University of Vienna, 2013), he also completed the MA Global History at the Freie University in 2016.

He is an editor of the journal Contributions to the History of Concepts and a member of the international Fear Research Network (FeRN).

Environment and Emotions: Human-Environment Relations between Colonial Scholarship and South Asian Buddhist Reformers in Colonial South Asia

Understanding how historical actors related to natural environments and the nonhuman is vital to comprehending the Age of High Imperialism as a crucial ecological and historical watershed: the beginning of the Anthropocene, when human action altered biophysical environments on a planetary scale. This project enquires into the role of emotions therein. What emotions did environments and their changes and crises elicit? What emotional grammars, both vernacular and colonial, did the actors draw on to make sense of these changes? And finally, how did nonhuman actors participate in these ecologies of emotion?

In order to answer these and more questions, the project focuses on a specific group of actors: Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism in colonial South Asia. Due to their centrality in the colonial interface between science and religion, an inquiry into how these actors conceived of the human relation to natural environments and nonhuman actors is particularly revealing. The project uncovers a variety of voices across the coloniser-colonised spectrum, drawing on published monographs, periodicals, visual materials, and archival documents, thus furthering the decolonization of the history of the concept of environment. The regional focus on South Asia, grounded in multiple South Asian languages, is contextualized through a transregional perspective by integrating intellectual networks connecting to both Europe and East Asia. Besides its historiographic work intervening in colonial and environmental history, the project furthermore makes an innovative theoretical contribution to the study of emotions. By drawing on Buddhist epistemologies in conjunction with posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and new insights in (environmental) neuroscience, it rethinks emotions as critical aspects of a non-Eurocentric model of worlded cognition that connects humans and their environments in both affective and culturally learned ways.

“Of Testimonios and Feeling Communities - Totaram Sanadhya’s Account of Indenture.” Südasien-Chronik - South Asia-Chronicle 6 (2016): 149-74. https://doi.org/10.18452/8519.

with Erica Baffelli, Jane Caple, and Levi McLaughlin. “The Aesthetics and Emotions of Religious Belonging: Examples from the Buddhist World.” Nvmen 68, no. 5-6 (2021): 421-35. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685276-12341634.

with Erica Baffelli. “Communities of Absence: Emotions, Time, and Buddhism in the Creation of Belonging.” Nvmen 68, no. 5-6 (2021): 436-62. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685276-12341635.

with Erica Baffelli. “Spatio-Temporal Translations: Practices of Intimacy under Absence.” Anthropology in Action 28, no. 1 (2021): 57-62. https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2021.280111.

“Resistance and Suffering: Shared Emotions in the Early Tibetan Diaspora in India.” Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (2022): 28-54. https://doi.org/10.22439/cjas.v40i2.6746.

“The Anagarika’s Lists: Time, Space and Emotions in the ‘Sarnath Notebooks’.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2024.2331350.

with Laura Otis. “Feeling Environments: Emotions Beyond Human Interiority.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 49, no. 1 (2023 [2024]): 138-58. https://doi.org/10.13109/gege.2023.49.1.138.

“Affective Entanglements: Human-Nonhuman Relations in Buddhist Ecologies of Feeling.” Journal of Global Buddhism 25, no. 1 (2024): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.26034/lu.jgb.2024.3812.

with Djo Juliette Fischer, Saskia Denecke, Lawrence Murphy, and Simone Kühn. “Are We Afraid of the Woods? An Investigation of the Implicit and Explicit Fear Reactions to Forests.” Environmental Research 260 (2024): 119573. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.119573.

“Arboreal Assemblages and Ecologies of Feeling: The Bodhi Tree in the Buddhist Reform Movement in Colonial South Asia.” South Asian Studies (published online 12 Sep 2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2024.2400780.