Todd Lewis has taught at the College of the Holy Cross since 1990. In 1996, he was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and in 2003 was promoted to the rank of Professor.
He has also been a Research Associate in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University since 1999.
Beginning with his scholarly training at Columbia University (where he earned his Ph.D. in Religion 1984), Professor Lewis' research and teaching has been interdisciplinary, linking anthropology, the history of religions, and Indology. His area of special expertise is Buddhist narratives and the role of merchants in Buddhist history. Professor Lewis is also one of the world's leading authorities on the religions of the mid-montane Himalayan region and the social history of Buddhism.
His special research focus for over thirty years has been Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley, particularly the traditions found among the Newars, the indigenous population of Nepal 's capital. He has resided in the Asan Tol neighborhood in the city of Kathmandu for his dissertation research (1979-1982), and for a postdoctoral fellowship (1987), both supported by the Fulbright-Hayes program in the Department of Education. Professor Lewis has been awarded many other fellowships to support his research and writing: he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Religion, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. In 2011, he was awarded a fellowship by the Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
In addition to several dozen articles published in leading academic journals and invited chapters contributed to edited scholarly volumes, Professor Lewis has published two books on Newar Buddhism.The first was Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal: Narratives and Rituals of Newar Buddhism (State University of New York Press, 2000). More recent was Sugata Saurabha: A Poem on the Life of the Buddha by Chittadhar Hridaya of Nepal, one of the landmarks in 20th Century Newar literature. A translation in collaboration with Subarna Man Tuladhar of Kathmandu has now appeared in two forms. A dual language edition was published in the Harvard Oriental Series (67) in 2008, the first in the Newari language to appear in this series; and then an English-only translation, with an abridged introduction, that was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
Professor Lewis has also contributed to a series of successful textbooks. His co-authored textbook, World Religions Today (published by Oxford University Press, now in its third edition), is widely used today in college classes. Other textbooks in this arena are: Asian Religions Today (Oxford, 2008),Religions of the West Today(Oxford, 2008), and Religion and Globalization (Oxford, 2007). In 2011, he was been named editor for a new book series, The Buddhist World Today, a series of teaching monographs to be published by Oxford University Press. Professor Lewis has also shot, directed, and produced films for classroom use.
Professor Lewis now teaches courses on Buddhism, seminars on schools of Buddhism, as well as courses on theories of religion and modernization. He has also developed the comparative courses “Gardens and World Religions,” “Music and Religion,” “Ancient India and Ancient Greece,” and “Ecology and Religion.”
At Holy Cross, Professor Lewis has been an active member of the Asian Studies Program and twice has served as its director. He is also a member of the Environmental Studies program faculty. Professor Lewis has also been a central participant in the 21st Century college curriculum reviews, having chaired the Language Requirement Review Committee (1996-7) and the Intellectual Maturation Committee (2003-4), and the Curriculum Review Steering Committee (2004-present). He has also served on the Curriculum Committee, the Committee on Tenure and Promotion, and chaired the Committee on Faculty Scholarship.
Professor Lewis has since 2002 directed six summer institutes funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, programs for K-12 teachers or college faculty from across the United States. These programs have drawn on his book, The Himalayas: A Syllabus of the Region’s History, Anthropology, and Religion (co-authored with Theodore Riccardi, Jr. Ann Arbor: Asian Studies Association, 1995), a work that provides a curriculum overview of the region and recommended readings. For his teaching and service to Holy Cross, and for his activities in the local and national educational community, Professor Lewis in 2008 was nominated as “Professor of the Year” in the program sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Professor Lewis was the founding co-chair of the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group within the American Academy of Religion, the leading organization for scholars in this field. He founded (with Professor William Herbrechtsmeier, Humboldt State University, The World Religions Digital Archive, an archive of catalogued, digital images, accessible at http://www.humboldt.edu/~rsdia. Lewis is also an member of the Asian Studies Association, the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and serves on the Editorial Board of Himalaya as well as the Institute for the Study of Buddhist Traditions, University of Michigan-University of Hawaii Press.
His previous academic positions were at Montclair State University (1989-1990), Rutgers University (1988-89), Carleton College (1988), Columbia University (1983-1987), and the University of California, Berkeley (1983).
Professor Lewis is married to Joy Chen Lewis, who joined him on previous Fulbright research sojourns to Nepal in 1987 and 1997-1998. They have two children, Melissa Dorothy (age 18) and Nathan Todd (age 12). They reside in Holden, Massachusetts
Todd Lewis has taught at the College of the Holy Cross since 1990. In 1996, he was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and in 2003 was promoted to the rank of Professor.