Tibet

Eveline Washul

Eveline Washul

Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute,
Associate Research Scholar, Adjunct Professor

Office: 913 IAB
Office Hours: T 10:00-11:00, and by appointment
Email: esy2103@columbia.edu

Educational Background
PhD: Indiana University
MA: Columbia University
BA: University of Colorado, Boulder
Classes Taught
EAAS GU4017 Ethnography and Representation in Tibet
HSEA GU4816 Examining Indigeneity in the Tibetan Context
EAAS GU4814 Space and Place in Urbanizing Tibet: Indigenous Experiences in China
HSEA GU4813 Early Tibetan History and Its Relations with China
EAAS GU4017 Ethnographic Tibet
Research Interests

Historical geographies of Tibet; Tibetan genealogies; anthropology of space and place; urbanization on the Tibetan Plateau

Eveline Washul is Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Associate Research Scholar, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and Tibetan Studies from Indiana University in 2018. Her research methods combine ethnography with Tibetan historical sources from the 12th to 20th centuries. Her dissertation research studied how the particularities of Tibetan relationships to places shape their transition from rural to urban livelihoods in the late-socialist reform period in the People’s Republic of China. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the history of geographical regions in Tibet.

Selected Publications

“Tibetan Translocalities: Navigating Urban Opportunities and New Ways of Belonging in Tibetan Pastoral Communities in China.” October 2018. Critical Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1520606

“Tracing the Chol kha gsum: Reexamining a Sa skya-Yuan Period Administrative Geography.” 2016. In “Ancient Currents, New Traditions: Papers Presented at the Fourth International Seminar of Young Tibetologists,” edited by Franz Xaver Erhard et al. Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, 37: 551-68. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_37_29.pdf

Gray Tuttle

Gray Tuttle

Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies

Office: 401 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 1:00-2:00, or by appointment
Phone: (212) 854-4096
Email: gwt2102@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Princeton University (’91)
MA: Harvard University (’96)
PhD: Harvard University (’02)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1365 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Tibet
EARL GU4310 Life Writing in Tibetan Buddhism
HSEA GU4720 20th Century Tibetan History

Research Interests

Tibetan History & Religion

Gray Tuttle studies the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in these historical relations is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examines the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. Instead, he argues, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory). His current research project, “Amdo Tibet, Middle Ground between Lhasa and Beijing (1578-1865),” is a historical analysis of the economic and cultural relations between China and Tibet in the early modern periods (16th – 19th centuries) when the intellectual and economic centers of Tibet shifted to the east, to Amdo — a Tibetan cultural region the size of France in northwestern China. Deploying Richard White’s concept of the “Middle Ground” in the context of two mature civilizations — Tibetan and Chinese — encountering one another, this book will examine how this contact led to three dramatic areas of growth that defined early modern Tibet: 1) the advent of mass monastic education, 20 the bureaucratization of reincarnate lamas’ charisma and 3) the development of modern conceptions of geography that reshaped the way Tibet was imagined.

Selected Publications

“An Unknown Tradition of Han Chinese Conversion to Tibetan Buddhism: Han Chinese Incarnate Lamas and Parishoners of Tibetan Buddhist Temples in Amdo, Zangxue xuekan/Journal of Tibetology (2014)

Sources of Tibetan Tradition (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

The Tibetan History Reader (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

 

 

 

Konchog Tseten

Konchog Tseten

ADJUNCT LECTURER IN TIBETAN

Office: TBA
Office Hours: TBA
Phone: TBA
Email: kt2590@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Tibetan Medicine, Qinghai Tibetan Medical College
BA: Northwest Normal University

Classes Taught

TIBT UN1410 First Year Classical Tibetan I
TIBT UN1411 First Year Classical Tibetan II

Research Interests

Tibetan Language

Konchog Tseten is originally from Rebgong (Qinghai, PRC) where he earned his language teaching certificate at the Rebgong Prefecture Teacher Training School. He later earned a BA at Northwest Normal University and a Master’s Degree in Tibetan medicine from Qinghai Tibetan Medical College. He taught Tibetan language for two years at the Gendun Chophel Middle School and has assisted researchers and anthropologists in collecting and interpreting field materials in Amdo (Tibet). Since 2015 he has taught Classical Tibetan language at Columbia University. He is currently a student of eastern medicine at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, NYC.