| DATE: | Friday-Saturday, February 9-10, 2007 |
|---|---|
| PLACE: | Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Berkeley |
| FORMAT: | Conference |
| SPONSOR: | Center for Buddhist Studies |
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.
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.
Georges Dreyfus was the first Westerner to obtain the title of Geshe Lharampa, the highest degree confered within the traditional Tibetan monastic system. He teaches Religion at Williams College. He is the author of The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (2003).
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.
Charles Hallisey teaches at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research interests focus on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Buddhist ethics and literature in Buddhist culture.
Natasha Heller is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2006-08. She specializes in the intellectual and religious history of China, with a particular focus on the intersection of Buddhism and literati culture. She received her Ph.D. (November 2005) from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, with a dissertation on the Chan monk Zhongfeng Mingben (1263-1323) and his literati followers. Other research interests include religion and the state, material culture, and concepts of law and justice in imperial China.
Donald Lopez is Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His recent books include Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism and The Madman's Middle Way.
Reiko Ohnuma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. She has published various articles on Indian Buddhist narrative literature, hagiography, and the role and imagery of women as well the recent book, Head, Eyes. Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (Columbia University Press).
James Robson is Assistant Professor of Asian languages and cultures and Helmut F. Stern Professor. He is working on a project called "Inside Asian Images: Religious Icons in the Context of Local and Ritual Practice" which is a study of a collection of small religious statuettes from the Hunan province in south-central China.
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.
Gregory Schopen is a Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His research focuses on the history of Indian Buddhism, the Mulasarvastiavda-Vinaya, early and medieval Mahayana Sutra literature, and Indian Buddhist epigraphy.
Robert 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).
George Tanabe is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawaii. He is editor of Religions of Japan in Practice (Princeton Readings in Religions), co-author of Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan, and other books.
