Keynote

Janet Gyatso

Janet Gyatso

Professor
Harvard University
Janet Gyatso (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley) is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. She has recently completed a new book, Being Human in...
Lama Jabb

Lama Jabb

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Wolfston College • Oxford
Lama Jabb was born and brought up in the Dhatsen tribe, a nomadic community from Northeastern Tibet. He completed his primary education in Tibet. Midway through the secondary education he left Tibet to attend a Tibetan refugee school in India. Since 1995 he has lived in United Kingdom. Lama Jabb received BA Honours degree in Political Science and MSc in International Relations from the School of Oriental and African Studies,...
Anne Klein

Anne Klein

Professor
Rice University
Anne Carolyn Klein (Rigzin Drolma), Professor and Former Chair of Religious Studies, Rice University, and Founding Director of Dawn Mountain. ( www.dawnmountain.org ). Her six books include Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse: A Story of Transmission; Meeting the Great Bliss Queen, Knowledge & Liberation, and Paths to the Middle as well as Unbounded Wholeness with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. She has also been a consulting scholar in several Mind...
Kurtis Schaeffer

Kurtis Schaeffer

Professor
University of Virginia
Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a student of the literary history and culture of Tibet, with a particular interest in poetry, life writing, narrative, and contemplative literature from across the Tibetan plateau. His books include Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun ; The Culture of the Book...

Presenter

Padma 'tsho

Padma 'tsho

Professor
Southwest University for Nationalities
Padma 'tsho (Baimacuo) is Professor in the Tibetan Studies Department of Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu, China and currently serves as Instructor at Front Range Community College in Longmont, Colorado. She holds a Ph.D. from Sichuan University in Chengdu and M.A. from Central Nationalities University in Beijing. Her areas of research and teaching include Tibetan ritual, culture, and literature as well as the education of Buddhist nuns in Tibetan...
Lara Braitstein

Lara Braitstein

Associate Professor
McGill University
Lara Braitstein is Associate Professor of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism at McGill University. She has also taught at the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute (K.I.B.I.) in New Delhi, and the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu. She teaches Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist hagiography, and Tibetan/Himalayan Buddhist literature and historiography. She translated the 14th Shamarpa’s The Path to Awakening, and is the author of The Adamantine Songs: Study, Translation, and Tibetan...
John Canti

John Canti

Editorial Director
84000
In 1970, while studying medicine at Cambridge, John Canti first met his Buddhist teachers, and started to practice under their guidance. After hospital work in London and Cambridge, he moved in the late seventies to eastern Nepal to establish tuberculosis programs in two remote hill districts. Beginning in 1980, he underwent two three-year retreats in the Dordogne, France. Emerging from retreat at the end of the 80s, he helped found...
Lucas Carmichael

Lucas Carmichael

Lecturer
University of Colorado Boulder
Lucas Carmichael received his Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation on English translations of the Daode jing . He is the co-founder and co-chair of the five-year “Transnational Religious Expression: Between Asia and North America” seminar at the American Academy of Religion. His research is stimulated by attention to translators as scribes and mediators of the cultural distances, hermeneutical negotiations, and historical connections...
Holly Gayley

Holly Gayley

Associate Professor
University of Colorado Boulder
Holly Gayley is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. With a passion for translation, her research examines the revitalization of Buddhism on the Tibetan plateau since the 1980s with a special interest in issues of gender, agency and identity in contemporary Buddhist literature by Tibetan masters and cleric-scholars. She became interested in the academic study of Buddhism through her travels among Tibetan communities in India,...
James Gentry

James Gentry

Assistant Professor
Rangjung Yeshe Institute
James Gentry is a scholar of Tibetan religion, culture, and society. In his Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2014 at Harvard University he studied the roles of sacred objects, such as relics, amulets, and other sacra, in the lives of Tibetan Buddhists, now available as a tome from Brill's Tibetan Studies Library, Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen . James’s research has led...
Stephen Gethin

Stephen Gethin

Fellow
Tsadra Foundation
Stephen Gethin studied veterinary medicine at Cambridge University, where he was also awarded a choral exhibition. After a number of years in professional practice, he spent much of the 1980s undertaking two three-year retreats in France, where he now lives and, as a founding member of the Padmakara Translation Group, continues to translate. He became a Tsadra Foundation Translation Fellow in 2005. His published translations include Nagarjuna’s Letter to a...
Amelia Hall

Amelia Hall

Associate Professor
Naropa University
Amelia Hall became a student of Thinley Norbu Rinpoche and Lama Tharchin Rinpoche in 2001. In 2005 she embarked upon a master’s degree in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies from the University of Oxford. She obtained her doctorate from Oxford in 2012, her dissertation, Revelations of a Modern Mystic: The Life and Legacy of Kun bzang bde chen gling pa 1928-2006, translates and reflects upon the biography of this Tibetan Buddhist...
Sarah Harding

Sarah Harding

Associate Professor; Fellow
Naropa University; Tsadra Foundation
Sarah Harding has been a Buddhist practitioner since 1974 and has been teaching and translating since completing a three-year retreat in 1980 under the guidance of Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche. Her publications include Creation and Completion, The Life and Revelations of Pema Lingpa, Treasury of Knowledge: Esoteric Instructions, Machig’s Complete Explanation and Niguma, Lady of Illusion. She is an associate professor at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she has been...
Sarah Jacoby

Sarah Jacoby

Associate Professor
Northwestern University
Sarah Jacoby, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University. She is also the co-chair of the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group at the American Academy of Religion. Sarah Jacoby studies Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and ritual in practice, gender and sexuality, Tibetan literature, religious auto/biography, Buddhist revelation (gter ma), and the history of eastern Tibet. She is the author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings...
Jules Levinson

Jules Levinson

Translator & Board Member
UMA Institute for Tibetan Studies
Jules B. Levinson graduated from Princeton University in 1975 and soon thereafter began studying at the University of Virginia under the guidance of Dr. Jeffrey Hopkins and the eminent Tibetan scholars invited by the University’s Center for South Asian Studies. He received a doctoral degree in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 1994. At present he lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.
Jue Liang

Jue Liang

Doctoral Student
University of Virginia
Jue Liang is a PhD candidate at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia. She is currently writing her dissertation, titled Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Life, Lives, and Afterlife of Ye shes mtsho rgyal . This dissertation explores the formation of a literary tradition surrounding Ye shes mtsho rgyal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and proposes an understanding of this tradition as growing out of and...
Nancy Lin

Nancy Lin

Visiting Scholar
University of California Berkeley
Nancy Lin is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. Her research focuses on courtly Buddhist culture, drawing from poetry and literature, images, objects, and other textual sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her current questions largely cluster around the dynamics between worldliness and renunciation as negotiated in such areas as religion and governance, social distinction and hierarchy,...
Natasha Mikles

Natasha Mikles

Lecturer
Texas State University
Natasha L. Mikles is a lecturer in Tibetan and Chinese Religions at Texas State University and the current Secretary-General of the International Seminar of Young Tibetologists. Her research examines the intersection of Buddhist hell literature and the Gesar epic, especially as it relates to the late 19th-century promotion of Dzogchen practices among Nyingma monasteries in Khams. Her articles include “Buddhicizing the Warrior-King Gesar in the dMyal gling rDzogs pa Chen...
Heidi Nevin

Heidi Nevin

Translator & Interpreter
Heidi studied Tibetan language at Manjushri Center for Tibetan Culture (1996-8); apprenticed to Kyabje Chatral Rinpoche (1996-2003); served Lama Tharchin by helping to translate the mkha' 'gro thugs thig (Vol. Ma of Dudjom Rinpoche's Collected Works) and other texts (2006-present). She translated the autobiography of Khenpo Ngakchung (Wondrous Dance of Illusion, Shambhala, 2013, restricted text) and is currently translating volume one of Dungse Trinley Norbu Rinpoche's three-volume Collected Works. Heidi...
Ben Nourse

Ben Nourse

Assistant Professor
University of Denver
Ben Nourse is assistant professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Denver, where he teaches an assortment of courses on Buddhism and Asian Religions, and a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School. He received a BA in Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a MA and PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia...
Annabella Pitkin

Annabella Pitkin

Assistant Professor
Lehigh University
Annabella Pitkin is Assistant Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Lehigh University. Her current research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist modernity, Buddhist ideals of renunciation, miracle narratives, and Buddhist biographies. She received her B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia, and has lived and traveled extensively in the Himalayan region, China, India, and Nepal. Her articles include “ Dazzling Displays and Mysterious Departures: Bodhisattva Pedagogy as Performance...
Andrew Quintman

Andrew Quintman

Associate Professor
Wesleyan University
Andrew Quintman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he specializes in the Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. His book The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014) won the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University, and received...
Gedun Rabsal

Gedun Rabsal

Senior Lecturer
Indiana University Bloomington
Gedun Rabsal is a Senior Lecturer within the Department of Central Eurasian Studies. Born and raised in Amdo, he studied at Tibetan monasteries in Tibet and India. Gedun Rabsal worked as a research fellow at Central University for Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, Varanasi and as editor of the Tibetan language newspaper Tibet Times (Bod kyi dus bab). Gedun Rabsal’s research focus is the history of Tibetan literature and Tibetan language...
JulieRegan

Julie Regan

Assistant Professor
La Salle University
Julie Regan is an assistant professor of Asian religions at La Salle University, where she teaches classes including Buddhism in Asia and Beyond, Tibetan Buddhism, and Yoga, Dharma and Devotion. Her scholarship combines a background in literature and literary arts (Brown University, B.A. and M.F.A.), study with traditional Tibetan teachers, and training in Buddhist studies (Harvard University, Ph.D.) in order to explore the connections between literary and bodily practices of...
Jann Ronis

Jann Ronis

Lecturer
University of California Berkeley
Jann Ronis studied religion, Tibetan studies, Sinology, and the Tibetan and Chinese languages at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2009 for a dissertation about developments in the monasteries of eastern Tibet, along the border between Tibet and China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His dissertation focused on innovations in scholastics, liturgical practices, and administration spearheaded by the lamas of Katok...
Andrew Schelling

Andrew Schelling

Professor
Naropa University
Andrew Schelling is a North American poet, translator, and editor. He has published seven books of classical Sanskrit, Prakrit, and vernacular poetry in translation. Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India , received the 1992 Academy of American Poets award for translation, the first time the preeminent institute for poetry in America recognized work from an Asian language. His latest book, Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo and...
Riga Shakya

Riga Shakya

Doctoral Student
Columbia University
Riga Shakya is a PhD candidate in Sino-Tibetan history in the History-East Asia Program at Columbia University. His interests broadly span classical and contemporary Tibetan literature and the history of Sino-Tibetan relations. Riga’s doctoral research centres on the emergence of Tibetan political biography during the Qing period, with particular attention to the literary works of the Tibetan cabinet minister and polymath Dokhar Tsering Wangyal (Mdo mkhar tshe ring dbang rgyal)...
Dominique Townsend

Dominique Townsend

Assistant Professor
Bard College
Dominique Townsend is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and Ph.D. from Columbia University in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research is stimulated by productive tensions in Buddhist cultures, such as the relationship between the cultivation of the arts and renunciation. Dominique’s primary interests include Buddhist poetics, pedagogy, and institutionalized charisma. Her...
Nicole Willock

Nicole Willock

Assistant Professor
Old Dominion University
Nicole Willock (Ph.D. Indiana University in Tibetan Studies and Religious Studies, 2011) is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She is 2017 Research Fellow, The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies for her book project: Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhists Making Modern China. She is currently polishing up A Tibetan-English Primer for Poetics (Snyan...