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. His other project based on archival research conducted in Beijing, Taipei, and Delhi follow the themes of language, colonial modernity, and nationalism to the mid-20th century by locating overlapping state initiatives to reform and standardize the Tibetan language in China, Taiwan, and India within anxieties about linguistic modernity and the phonocentric turn.
Riga Shakya
