Tenzin Yewong Dongchung

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: tyd2102@columbia.edu

In her dissertation, Yewong Dongchung studies the cultural and material history of woodblock printing technology in Tibet and Inner Asia from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Her chapters are based on major printing sites in Beijing, Kham, Central Tibet, and Amdo/Mongolia. In her study of artisans and artisanal knowledge, her methodology is informed by material culture studies (studied under Professor Dorothy Ko) and history of science and technology (studied under Professor Pamela Smith). She works closely with museum collections on Tibetan materials and has completed an orals field in Philosophy of History with Professor Manan Ahmed to understand the connected histories of colonialism and secularism in dealing with the collected objects. 

Yewong completed her Master’s thesis on a twentieth-century Tibetan monastery architect and a master carver called Cho Phuntsok. She earned her undergraduate degree at Wellesley College. 

Recent publications and events:

Review of “Common Ground: Tibetan Buddhist Expansion and Qing China’s Inner Asia.” By Lan Wu, New York: Columbia University Press: 2022. In Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities.

Co-organized and moderated “Presenting Tibet: A Curators’ Roundtable Discussion” with four curators from Rubin Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021.

“An Eighteenth-Century Textual Labyrinth: How a Printing Network of Tibetan Buddhism Developed in Qing Inner Asia Under the Kangxi Emperor’s reign,” Waxing Moon Journal, an annual, peer reviewed journal hosted by the Centre for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, 2021.

“Understanding Carton in early modern Europe, fol. 41r,” The Making and Knowing Project, A Digital Critical Edition of BnF Ms Fr. 640, 2020. For more information see https://www.makingandknowing.org/

Review of “Tibetan Resettlement Stories: Voices of Boston.” High Peaks Pure Earth, 2019.