Reflecting on our December 6 screening of Tukdam: Between Worlds, a new documentary film by Donagh Coleman. The event was cohosted by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program and the School of the Arts at Columbia University, with funding from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
We are very excited to announce that the Climate Humanities Initiative at Columbia University has awarded Professor Gray Tuttle (along with Dr. Hưng Nguyễn (Lamont-Doherty) and Ph.D. candidate Palden Gyal) funding to develop a course on the climate history of Tibet.
The C.V. Starr East Asian Library announced on August 1 the addition of Kristina Dy-Liacco as the new Tibetan Studies Librarian.
After his eighth-year review, Sonam Tsering has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. This is the first time for one of our language instructors to earn this title, and his promotion thus marks an important milestone for the Tibetan Language Program as well. Gen Sonam Tsering has served as Director of the Tibetan language program at Columbia since 2014, and is responsible for teaching all three levels of modern Tibetan.
Dr. Lauran Hartley has been appointed as the new Associate Research Scholar and Director of the Modem Tibetan Studies Program (MTSP) at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. As part of her appointment, Lauran will also be teaching courses for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
It has been a privilege to direct Columbia’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program (MTSP) for the last couple of years, working together with a team of talented scholars, students, and colleagues at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and C.V. Starr East Asian Library. We celebrated a milestone—MTSP’s 20th year anniversary—with a series of over twenty events in 2019 alone, the publication of a 20th anniversary report, and the launch of our new website. It has also been exciting to grow the MTSP in new directions, notably, building a regional hub…
In March 2021, MTSP alumna, Dominique Townsend, released her new book entitled A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery. Dominique Townsend is currently assistant professor of Buddhist studies at Bard College. She is also a poet and the author of Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero (2015), a book about Buddhism for children and families.
Elisabeth A. Benard, Columbia University PhD (1990), studied Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with Professor Alex Wayman and Tibetan language with Lozang Jamspal in the 1980s. Her interest in Ma Chig Labdron led her to pursue a possible connection to the female tantric figure of Chinnamasta for her dissertation research and first book. With the support of the Sapan Fund, Khyentse Foundation and Sachen Foundation, she researched and has recently published The Sakya Jetsunmas: The Hidden World of Tibetan Female Lamas—the first full treatment of the role of remarkable Tibetan Buddhist women in the…
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute invites applications for the role of Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Modern Tibetan Studies for academic year 2021-2022.
WEAI seeks a Postdoctoral Research Scholar who studies Tibet from any of a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, environmental studies, film studies, gender studies, geography, history, literature, material and visual culture, political science, and religion. The Research Scholar will teach one course each semester as well as pursue his or her own research. At least one of the two courses will be a seminar in the Research…
In Spring 2021, the Modern Tibetan Studies program welcomed its first postdoctoral fellow, Marnyi Gyatso. He studies the historical changes of Inner Asia from the fourteenth century to the twentieth century. Working both in the field and in the archive, his research focuses on the social, political, economic and religious interactions between China and its multiethnic neighbors. His dissertation examines the resilience of the tsowa-based Tibetan social-political structure and the evolution of the complex tripartite Tibetan-Chinese-Muslim relation on the Sino-Tibetan…
In the Fall semester of 2020, Columbia faculty member, Pema Bhum, will offer the Modern Tibetan Studies Program's first Advanced Classical Literary Tibetan course. The course will focus on reading texts written during the Ganden Phodrang period up through the 19th century. Over a two-semester progression, the course will cover three sets of material: 1) famous of otherwise influential classical works; 2) important historical texts that have come to light in recent years but are scarcely known in Western scholarship; and 2) classical language texts that support the research needs of…
In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state- building, but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community.
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