| DATE: | Friday, May 5, 2006 to Sunday, May 7, 2006 |
|---|---|
| PLACE: | Lipman Room, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley |
| FORMAT: | Conference |
| SPONSORS: | Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities |
Patricia Berger is Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests focus on Chinese Buddhist art and Asian architecture. She is the author of Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (2003).
Benjamin Bogin is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation focused on the autobiography of the Tibetan Buddhist lama, Yolmo Tenzin Norbu. He is presently engaged in research on the artistic, literary, and ritual traditions surrounding the Tibetan Buddhist pure land known as the Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain.
Timothy Brook is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia where he is also Principal of St. Johns College and the Republic of China Chair of Chinese History, Institute of Asian Research. He is the author of Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (1993), The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (1998), Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Chinese Elites on the Yangtze Delta (2005), and The Chinese State in Ming Society (2005).
Bryan J. Cuevas is Associate Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Religion at Florida State University and currently Freeman Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley. His current research interests include Tibetan history and historiography, Buddhist popular religion, and monastic politics in premodern Tibet. He is author of The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (2003).
Jacob Dalton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. His early work was on the history of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. More recently, he has been examining the role of violence in the early Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism. His work focuses on the Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang and in particular the genre of ritual manuals.
Johan Elverskog is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. His research focuses on the history of Buddhism in Inner Asia. He is the author of Uygur Buddhist Literature (1997), The Jewel Translucent Sutra (2003), and two forthcoming books: The Pearl Rosary and Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China. He is currently working on the social history of Qing Buddhism.
Janet Gyatso is Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her books include Women of Tibet (2006; Co-edited with Hanna Havnevik); Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (1998) and In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (1992). Her current book project is on traditional medical culture in Tibet, its relation to modernity, and its relation to Buddhism. She has also been writing on conceptions of sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism and in Tibetan medicine.
Matthew Kapstein is Director of Tibetan Religious Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) and Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Chicago. His books include The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism (2000), Reason's Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (2002), and The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience (2004). Among his present projects are The Tibetans: A General Introduction to Tibetan Studies (forthcoming, 2006) and Buddhism Between Tibet and China, a collaborative work that explores the history of Sino-Tibetan religious relations from the Tang dynasty to the present day.
Nancy Lin is a doctoral student in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her Master's thesis was on a Tibetan reworking of the Ramayana by the 20th-century author Dondrup Gyal. Currently she is researching Tibetan literary and visual adaptations of Buddhist jataka and avadana narratives.
Derek Maher is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Religious Studies at East Carolina University where he teaches Tibetan religion and culture. His interests include religious and political history, biography, and scholastic philosophy. He is currently completing his annotated translation of Tsepön Shakabpa's One Hundred Thousand Moons: A Political History of Tibet.
Irmgard Mengele is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2005 she finished her Ph.D. dissertation on the life of the Tenth Karmapa at the University of Hamburg with Professor David Jackson. She is the author of dGe-‘dun-chos-‘phel: A Biography of the 20th-Century Tibetan Scholar (1999) and is currently preparing her work on the Tenth Karmapa for publication as a monograph.
Alexander von Rospatt teaches in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the doctrinal history of Indian Buddhism, and in Newar Buddhism, the only Indic Mahayana tradition that continues to persist in its original South Asian setting (in the Kathmandu Valley) to the present.
Kurtis R. Schaeffer is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His recent research interests include the social history of books in Tibet, women's autobiography in Tibetan Buddhism, and the scholarly medical traditions of Tibet. His publications include Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun (2004) and Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of the Buddhist Poet-Saint Saraha (2005).
Robert H. Sharf teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism, but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion. He is the author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (2002).
Tsering Shakya teaches in the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. His primary research interests are the political, cultural, and literary histories of twentieth-century Tibet. His publications include Fire Under the Snow: The Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner (1997) and The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (1999).
Gray Tuttle is the Leila Hadley Luce Chair in Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. He studies the history of twentieth-century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet's relations with the Qing empire. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in these historical relations is explored in his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (2005). His current research project focuses on the support that Tibetan Buddhist institutions received from the governments of China from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries and how this support has fueled expansion and renewal of these institutions into the contemporary period.
Vesna Wallace teaches at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests focus on the comparative analysis of the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, Tibet,and Mongolia. Recent publications include The Kalacakratantra: The Chapter on the Individual Together with the Vimalaprabha (2004) and The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual (2001).