简介

Throughout my career I have been interested in several broad comparative themes in the history of religion, including scholasticism, sexuality, and dreams. My more theoretical work has interrogated some of the basic categories of the field—like identity, philosophy, theology, and comparison. Over the past decade, however, my work has focused more on the close reading of classical Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts. I have always been interested in Tibetan Buddhist doctrinal literature, especially polemics, but I have also worked on ritual, historiographical and hagiographical texts. I have longstanding interests in gender and sexuality and just completed a lengthy study of sexuality in classical South Asian Buddhism, which is in press. My translation of Mipam’s Treatise on Royal Ethics (Rgyal po’i lugs kyi bstan bcos), a work of Buddhist political theory, is close to completion and should come out next year. My next project focuses on Sera, one of the largest and most important monasteries in the Tibetan world. I lived and studied at Sera (the diaspora Sera in Karnataka, India) from 1980 until 1985, and have been collecting materials for this project—images, texts, cartographic materials, and oral interviews—for more than three decades. Some of my findings have been published on my Sera Project website (www.seramonastery.org), hosted by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library. The new, book-length study of Sera on which I am about to embark will draw on draw on this earlier research, but it will also contain a wholly new narrative history of the monastery from its founding in 1419 until the present day. This research is being funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship and by an ACLS/Ho Collaborative Research Fellowship. During my tenure of the ACLS/Ho Fellowship, I will be working with my colleague, Dr. Penpa Dorjee of the Central University of Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India. The graduate students that I supervise work on a wide variety of projects in Tibet and the Himalayan Buddhism using methodological lenses as diverse philosophy, intellectual history, and ethnography.