The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded Columbia University a five-year grant to support the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute to continue its efforts in providing a global platform for exchange among practitioners, scientists, and scholars. The project will leverage ongoing work with the Climate School/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and other universities in North America, as well as researchers in the Himalayas and in China. Above all, the project will engage community leaders from the Tibetan Plateau and broader Himalayan Region who have studied and practiced indigenous ways of mitigating the impacts of climate change and building paths to resilience. The grant project is entitled "Expanding Tibetan Studies: Indigenous Knowledge & Climate Change Research" and will launch on July 1, 2024.
"We are honored and deeply grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation for its recognition and for renewing the cornerstone support it first granted twenty years ago," said MTSP Director Lauran Hartley. "It is exciting to engage a growing and increasingly diverse community. Our aim is to bring Tibetan Studies into conversation and a working partnership with researchers and practitioners, at universities and beyond. The Luce Foundation grant allows us to do exactly that -- and around an issue of critical importance and global concern."
Since 2019, the MTSP has hosted in-person and online panels featuring climate-change experts from around the world. In the spring 2023, Professor Gray Tuttle, now chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, offered a new course initiative "The Third Pole: A Climate History of the Tibetan Plateau," with Dr. Hung Nguyen, a hydrologist and dendrologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of the Climate School. Postdoctoral Scholar Konchok Gelek, who joined the Weatherhead East Asian Institute in October, is teaching "Climate Change: The Tibetan Plateau as a Case Study" this spring.
The Modern Tibetan Studies Program (MTSP) at Columbia University brings a contemporary focus to Tibetan and Himalayan studies through its teaching, programming, special projects, and community engagement. Seated at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, MTSP serves as a unique hub working with academic and other partners, including museums and community groups in the New York area.
The Henry Luce Foundation grant coincides with the 25th anniversary of the MTSP, which will celebrate with a wide range of public programming in 2024.
