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.