Project Faculty and Staff Co-Directors

Co-director Todd T. Lewis, Professor of World Religions at Holy Cross College, is a specialist in Himalayan studies, one of the leading figures in the field. Beyond being a scholar who has published numerous studies on Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley, he has visited nearly every Himalayan region in the course of over twenty-five years of research. Professor Lewis has taught college level courses matching the Institute curriculum and 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) provides an in-depth overview of the region and is a valuable resource for the Institute. Professor Lewis is 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.

Co-Director Leonard van der Kuijp was appointed Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Harvard University in 1995, where he is also chairman of the Sanskrit and Indian Studies Department. Fluent in classical and modern Tibetan, Nepali, and spoken Chinese, since 1980 he has worked for five years in Nepal and has traveled extensively in Central Tibet and China. Professor van der Kuijp served as Associate Editor of the Himalayan Research Bulletin from 1989-1993 and has taught numerous courses covering aspects of Tibetan civilization and Buddhism. His main areas of specialization are Indo-Tibetan intellectual history, Buddhist thought, and Sino-Tibetan relations and he is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities in these fields. Having participated in many public programs concerned with the history of Tibet past and present, he shares with Professor Lewis an enjoyment in teaching in continuing education programs.

Visiting Scholars

The experts who will present lectures and seminars constitute a “who’s who” of Himalayan studies, leading scholars who have contributed to the understanding of the region’s history, anthropology, and religious life, diplomats who have been active in governmental relations across the Himalayas, and priests and authors who have had especially distinguished careers. It is a great pleasure to host them for our Institute, and to have them enrich our program.

Naresh Man Bajracarya is a distinguished young Newari Buddhist priest who commands the vast ritual repertoire and meditative practices of his native tradition. He is also the first Newar Buddhist to leave Nepal and gain a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies (University of Delhi). In 2000, Bajracarya was named director of the Buddhist Studies Program at Tribhuvan University in Nepal, where he also performs traditional rites for a broad circle of Buddhist householder.

Dina Bangdel, Professor of Asian Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, is ranked among the finest art historians in the world focusing on the Himalayan region. Having done research on Newar Buddhist and Hindu art in the Kathmandu Valley since 1988, she has curated major exhibitions of these traditions. The most notable, “Circle of Bliss,” she co-curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2003-4. Her presentations to the 2006 Institute were among the most highly rated based upon her clear articulation of topics and an extraordinary selection of images.

Bronwen Bledsoe, Curator of the South Asia Collection at Cornell’s Kroch Library and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Asian Studies Department, conducted her doctoral research on the textual and epigraphic sources for the social, religious, political history of the Newars of Nepal. Her dissertation completed at the University of Chicago in 2004, Written in Stone : Inscriptions of the Kathmandu Valley's Three Kingdoms,” is a major contribution to the history of the Kathmandu Valley.

Sienna Craig, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth, has been studying the northern Himalayan regions of Nepal since 1997. In addition to innovative and ground-breaking work on Tibetan medicine and veterinary practices among Tibetanized peoples, especially those in Dolpo and Mustang, she has also written a book based upon her personal and research experiences, Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage Through the Himalayas

Georges Dreyfus, Professor of Religion at Williams College, is author of several books, including The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Prof. Dreyfus lived for over a decade as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in the exile community in India. For his scholarly studies there, Professor Dreyfus was award the Geshe degree, the highest academic rank for Tibetan monks. An expert in Tibetan Buddhist scholastic traditions and Mahayana philosophies, he has taught for academic, Buddhist community, and general audiences.

David Germano is Associate Professor of Buddhism at the University of Virginia. A specialist in Tibetan Buddhism who has completed translations of texts describing hitherto unexplored Dzogchen meditation practices, he has published many articles concerning Tibetan texts in context. Since 1998, Professor Germano has established the Tibetan and Himalayan Archive at the University of Virginia that has already posted 10,000 catalogued images, several hundred texts, video clips. Still being designed and developed, this archive is already the most important resource in the world for the field, its rich selection of curricular materials useful for scholars and teachers working on the peoples and cultures in the Himalayan region.

David Gray received his Ph.D. in the History of Religion from Columbia University. His research has focused on the Cakrasamvara Tantra, an important Indic scripture that became popular in several traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and in Nepal. Dr. Gray joined the Santa Clara University faculty in 2005 and teaches courses on Asian Religions and the comparative study of religious traditions. Among a new cohort of scholars focusing on careful, scholarly study of Vajrayana Buddhism, his expertise in this field will benefit all undergraduate instructors who inevitably struggle with the multiplicity of tantric traditions and the problems of presenting the material.

David Holmberg has researched among the Tamang - a Tibeto-Burman speaking population in Nepal - focused on ritual syncretism: the relations among Buddhist, shamanic, and sacrificial practices in a rural society. He has published many studies on ritual and social organization, state formation, culture and politics, the history of anthropology of the Himalaya, and the anthropology of power, especially the nature of symbolic or sacred power. An anthropologist at Cornell University, he has mentored dozens of scholars who have studied in Nepal.

Guy Leavitt is Preceptor in Sanskrit at Harvard University. As expert on Kashmir and its religious traditions, he will present an overview of Buddhism in Gandhara and its relationship to Kashmiri Shaivism.

 

 

Sarah LeVine has conducted extensive research on the revival of the Buddhist nun’s order in south Asia, as well as tracking the lives of young women from Nepal who have joined the modernist Theravada Buddhist monastic community. Her discussion of Buddhism as lived experience today, especially for women drawn to seek religious vocation and education, powerfully conveys the nature of this monastic tradition, yesterday and today.

 

Kathryn March, an anthropologist at Cornell University, has worked on questions of anthropology, gender and social change in Himalayan Asia since 1973. Her research has ranged across much of north central Nepal, among Sherpa and, especially, Tamang communities there. Prof. March’s studies are constructed o interviews, life histories, and personal stories to explore how people relate their own experiences and reflections to larger cultural and esthetic frameworks, such as those of ritual, religion and song.

 

Charles Ramble, Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism at Oxford University, since 1980 has studied the peoples of the southern Tibetan frontier, most recently those in the Mustang Valley of north central Nepal. Dr. Ramble in his publications and teaching has addressed issues concerning religious doctrines, ritual practices, and the patterns of political rule manifested in the communities spanning the periphery of Tibet.

 

Anne de Sales, a researcher in France’s prestigious Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique, is one of but a few western scholars to have studied the Kham Magars, a Tibeto-Burman language-speaking ethnic group who occupy the mid-montane region of west central Nepal. Not following either Hinduism or Buddhism, Magar religious life is oriented around shamans who contact the gods via trance and lead the souls of the dead to the next world. Dr. de Sales is a leading authority on shamanism and through her rich ethnographic experience will make compelling the connections between Buddhist traditions and indigenous shamanism.

Kurtis Schaeffer scholarly interests are focused on Tibetan cultural history, the transmission of manuscripts, and the role of women in Tibetan Buddhism. He is the author of many articles and several books. He will share his insights on women in the region through his landmark case study on the life and times of a remarkable female Tibetan ascetic.

 

Jonathan Silk is one of the foremost authorities on Mahayana Buddhism. He obtained his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan in 1994. Prof. Silk, now Professor of Religion at the University of Leiden, has also taught at Grinnell College, Yale, and UCLA. Silk has a breadth of interests in Buddhism, from the oldest Buddhist sources and the formation of early Buddhist communities in Asia to the current transmissions of Buddhism to the West.

Gray Tuttle, Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, is a specialist in twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire. His Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005) is a landmark study in which he argues that a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory).

Jan Willis is Walter A. Crowell University Professor of the Social Sciences, Wesleyan University. One of the earliest American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, Willis has published numerous essays and articles on Buddhist meditation, hagiography, women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and race. Her latest book was Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey (2001). Willis also is the author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (1972) and On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi (1979), among others. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland and the U.S. for four decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for 32 years.