Tibet

Filed Under: Adjunct, Tibet, Tibetan

Elena Pakhoutova

Adjunct Lecturer of Tibetan Art

Office: 401 Kent Hall
Office Hours: M 4-5 PM
Email: ep3329@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: University of Virginia (Art History)
MA: University of Virginia (Art History)

University Diploma (MA/BA History and Historical Archival Research): Russian State University for Humanities, Moscow, Russia

Courses Taught

HSEA GU 4725 Tibetan Art and Material Culture

Area of Study

Buddhist Art, Indian Art, Tibetan Art, Cross-cultural exchanges in Inner Asia; Historical and Contemporary Himalayan Art 

Research Interests

Dr. Pakhoutova is Senior Curator, Himalayan Art at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. She has taught at University of Virginia and the Eugene Lang College, New School, New York. 

Her background in Tibetan Buddhist studies informs her interdisciplinary interests in Buddhist art and ritual, art production and patronage, material culture, narrative in Tibetan visual culture, and contemporary Himalayan art. 

She curated several thematic exhibitions that introduce and contextualize Tibetan and Himalayan art, including Death Is Not the End (2023), The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel (2019).

Most recently, the ongoing traveling exhibition Gateway to Himalayan Art is an integral component of Project Himalayan Art which she co-leads with Dr. Karl Debreczeny.

Selected Publications

Himalayan Art in 108 Objects, ed. (with Karl Debreczeny). Scala and Rubin Museum of Art, 2023.

“For One and or for Many: Affluent and Common Patronage of Narrative Art in Tibet.” Material Religion 2021: vol. 17, no. 1

The Second Buddha: Master of Time, ed. The Rubin Museum, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, and Delmonico Prestel, 2018

The All-Knowing Buddha: A Secret Guide (with Karl Debreczeny, Christian Luczanits, and Jan van Alphen). Antwerp: Museum Aan de Stroom. MAS: 2014.

“A Wondrous Great Accomplishment: a Painting of an Event.” PIATS 2010: Proceedings of the Twelfth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Vancouver, 2010. Asianart.com (2012)

by

Gray Tuttle

Gray Tuttle

Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Office: 401 Kent Hall
Office Hours: 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 modern Tibetan history, from the 1600s to the 1950s. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examined 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, 2) the bureaucratization of reincarnate lamas’ charisma and 3) the development of modern conceptions of geography that reshaped the way Tibet was imagined. Recently he has turned to increasingly large data sets in an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history. In an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history, Gray has turned to increasingly large data sets over the course of his career. Starting with a database of over 1000 Amdo monasteries with dozens of fields of data (GIS location, foundation data, number of monks, rooms, livestock, etc), led to building datasets on 100s of incarnation series and monastic colleges as well, which have shaped the direction of the Amdo history book project in significant ways. Lately, with a research assistant, Gray has worked with larger datasets and the statistical computing and graphing programming language called “R” to examine existing data on Tibetan (mostly monk’s) longevity in comparison with Chinese monks, Chinese literati, and Europeans in history. Future plans include working with even larger datasets by examining the hydrology of the Tibetan plateau with climate scientists, to see if new perspectives of the large arcs of Tibetan history might be reframed by a deeper understanding of climate data.

Selected Publications

With Lan Wu. “Tibetan Buddhist Vanguards among the Mongols and Manchus, 1576-1638.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, (October 2021).

“Pattern Recognition: Tracking the Spread of the Incarnation Institution through Time and across Tibetan Territory.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines. 38 (February 2017)

Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West. Co-edited with Ben Hillman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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)

Dominique Townsend

Dominique Townsend

Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Department of Religion

Office: 480 Claremont Ave Ste, Suite 103, MC 9610, New York NY
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 11:00am – 1:00pm and by appointment
Phone: 212-853-5640
Email: dt80@columbia.edu

Background
Dominique Townsend is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism whose research combines historical and literary methods. Her interests include Tibetan Buddhist cultural production, poetry, aesthetics, dreams, gender, and translation. Her research is rooted primarily in Classical Tibetan texts, with an emphasis on the seventeenth-twentieth centuries. She teaches courses on Tibetan Buddhism and history, Asian humanities, poetics, new media, dreaming, and Buddhist approaches to death and dying. Before joining the faculty at Columbia in July 2024, she was Associate Professor of Religion at Bard College, and prior to that she served as Head of Interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art.
Research Interests

Currently Townsend’s research is focused on a book about dreams and dreaming in Tibetan Buddhism, All this is Dreamlike, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Her previous books include A Buddhist Sensibility (Columbia University Press, 2021), and the co-edited, Longing to Awaken, (University of Virginia Press, 2024). She has also published a book of poems and a children’s book.