Elena Pakhoutova is senior curator, Himalayan art, at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and holds a PhD in Asian art history from the University of Virginia. She has curated several exhibitions at the Rubin, including Death Is Not the End (2023), The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel (2019), and The Second Buddha: Master of Time (2018). More →
Karl Debreczeny is senior curator, collections and research, at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. His research focuses on artistic, religious, and political exchanges between the Tibetan and Chinese traditions. His publications include The Black Hat Eccentric: Artistic Visions of the Tenth Karmapa (2012) and the coedited The Tenth Karmapa and Tibet’s Turbulent Seventeenth Century (2016). More →
Kimon Keramidas is the head of digital content and strategy at the Rubin museum of Himalayan art, spearheading new digital projects and initiatives. Before joining the Rubin in 2022, Keramidas served as a digital humanities consultant to the Museum to bridge the technical and subject matter experts, conceptualizing how digital tools can be presented to contextualize historical, object-centered information in compelling ways for a broad audience. More →
Kerry Lucinda Brown is professor of art history at Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. She received her PhD in art history from Virginia Commonwealth University, concentrating in the art and architecture of South Asia and the Himalayas, with a specialization in Nepal. Her work examines Newar Buddhist art within the larger context of South Asian Buddhist heritage, addressing issues of image veneration and adornment, gift-giving, pilgrimage and sacred landscapes, and public ritual spectacle.
Sienna R. Craig is a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College, where she has taught since 2006. A cultural and medical anthropologist, Craig enjoys writing across genres, from narrative ethnography to poetry, fiction, and children’s literature. She is the author of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020) and Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012), among other works. More →
James Gentry is assistant professor of religious studies at Stanford University. He specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, with particular focus on the literature and history of its Tantric traditions. He is the author of Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen. Gentry’s research ranges across Tibetan and Himalayan intellectual history, material culture, contemplative and ritual practice, scriptural translation, revelation, and canonicity, from the Tibetan imperial period to the present. More →
Dr. Huatse Gyal is an anthropologist, writer, filmmaker, and assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University. His work often focuses on the lands and peoples of Tibet. More →
Susan L. Huntington is distinguished university professor emeritus at The Ohio State University in Columbus and a specialist in the art of South Asia. Her main publications include The Art of Ancient India (with contributions by John C. Huntington), The Pala-Sena Schools of Sculpture, and Leaves From the Bodhi Tree (with John C. Huntington). Her work on the early Buddhist art of India, published in several articles and a forthcoming book, has stimulated considerable debate and discussion within the academic community. More →
Sarah Jacoby studies Asian religions with a specialization in Tibetan Buddhism. She received her BA from Yale University, majoring in women’s studies, and her MA and PhD degrees from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include Indo-Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and ritual in practice, studies in gender and sexuality, Tibetan literature, autobiography studies, Buddhist revelation, the history of emotions, Buddhism in contemporary Tibet, and eastern Tibetan area studies. More →
Jue Liang is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a BA and MA from Renmin University of China (2009, 2011), an MA from the University of Chicago (2013), and a PhD from the University of Virginia (2020). Her research and teaching engage with questions about continuities as well as innovations in the gender discourses of Buddhist communities. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation in general, and translating Tibetan literature in particular. More →
Todd Lewis has taught world religions at the College of the Holy Cross, primarily Hinduism and Buddhism, since 1990. In 1996, he was promoted to associate professor in the Religious Studies Department and in 2003 was promoted to the rank of professor. In 2015, Lewis was named the Monsignor Edward G. Murray Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He has also been a research associate in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University. More →
William A. McGrath is the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. His research concerns the historical intersections of religion and medicine in Tibet, and he recently edited the volume Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine (2019).
Annabella Pitkin is associate professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Lehigh University. Her research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist modernity, Buddhist ideals of renunciation, miracle narratives, and Buddhist biographies. She received her BA from Harvard University and PhD in religion from Columbia University. She is the author of Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint, which explores themes of non-attachment and teacher-student relationship in the life of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen. More →
Riga Shakya is a historian of empire and colonialism in East Asia and presently serves as lecturer in the Literature Humanities program at Columbia University. His interests lie in the connected histories of state and empire building across China, Tibet, and the Himalayas, and the convergence between early modern knowledge systems and colonial modernity. With a PhD in Tibetan and late imperial Chinese history at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) at Columbia University, he is working on a project based on his dissertation, Mirrors of History: The Poetics of Kingship in the Time of Empire. More →
Gray Tuttle is Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. Tuttle’s focus on the saliency of the Tibetan region as an area study has produced important scholarship on the formation of the modern Chinese nation-state. His multidisciplinary approach, encompassing political, intellectual, economic, and geographic histories of Sino-Tibetan relations, demonstrates the rich potential of Tibetan studies.
Charles Albert Edward Ramble is an anthropologist and former university lecturer in Tibetan and Himalayan studies at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. Since 2009 he has been professor and directeur d’études (histoire et philologie tibétaines) at the Ecole pratique des hautes études (EPHE, Sorbonne), Paris. Between 2006 and 2013 he was elected president of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) and convened the tenth seminar of IATS at Oxford in 2003. More →
Yewong Tenzin Dongchung is studying the cultural and material history of woodblock printing technology in Tibet and Inner Asia from the 17th to the 19th century for her dissertation. Her chapters are based on major printing sites in Beijing, Kham, central Tibet, and Amdo/Mongolia. In her study of artisans and artisanal knowledge, her methodology is informed by material culture studies (studied under Professor Dorothy Ko) and history of science and technology (studied under Professor Pamela Smith). More →
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