Apr. 2026: Constantine Lignos (Ph.D. ‘26) Awarded Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University
Constantine will be a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University through the Institute of Sacred Music. He will prepare his recently-defended dissertation, “Dancing Tantra: Body, Text, and Performance in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism,” into a book manuscript. In December 2025, Constantine organized the Ocean of Song & Dance conference at Columbia University.
May 2025: Palden Gyal (ABD) Awarded Khyentse Foundation Award for Excellence in Buddhist Studies
Every year, the Khyentse Foundation partners with selected universities around the world to encourage Buddhist scholarship by presenting the KF Award for Excellence, which comes with a prize of US$1,500, to a student who has shown exceptional achievement in the field of Buddhist Studies. Tibetan Studies Ph.D. candidate Palden Gyal was the recipient of the award at Columbia University this spring.
May 2025: William Gore (B.A. ’24) Awarded Khyentse-Pritzker Scholarship
William will pursue a master’s degree (MSt) in Tibetan Studies at Oxford’s Wolfson College with funding from a Khyentse-Pritzker Scholarship. While at Columbia, he majored in Linguistics with an EALAC concentration in Tibetan Studies and was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa.
April 2025: Cameron Foltz (ABD) Publication
Cameron published his article, “Community Territorialization through Monastery Construction in Tsongön (Qinghai): Pastoralist Migration and Settlement in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in the Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines.
April 2025: Tenzing Dolma Sherpa (M.A. ’24) Awarded Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship for Research at the Library of Congress
During her fellowship, Tenzing will draw from the Tibetan Rare Book Collection to examine ritual texts within Buddhist cosmology, aiming to deepen understanding of the embodied experiences of oracles.
Jan–May 2025: Constantine Lignos (ABD) Teaches New Course
The course “The Body and/in Performance: Dance & Drama in Tibet & China” examined the body and bodily practices in various performance traditions in Tibet and China by reading theory from the fields of performance and dance studies alongside regional case studies of dances and dramas in East Asia.
Sept. 2024: Tenzin Yewong Dongchung (Ph.D. ’24) Awarded Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University
Yewong is now teaching as a Research Associate in the Department of History at Brown University, having been awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. She is currently preparing her dissertation “Carvers and Print Workshops: The History of Tibetan-language Woodblock Printing Technology” as a book manuscript.
Read more about Dr. Dongchung’s research.
July 2024: Palden Gyal (ABD) Publication
Palden Gyal published “The Sociopolitical Impact of a Natural Disaster: The Snow Disaster of the Earth-Rat Year (1828) in Northwestern Tibet” in Climates and Cultures in History. The article illustrates how the research of climate scientists can be used to better understand demographic and other developments in Tibetan history.