Berthe Jansen
Berthe Jansen is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University. She is a scholar of Buddhist Studies, specializing in Tibetan social and religious history. She lived in India for five years and graduated from the Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo Translator Programme in Dharmashala in 2005. Thereafter she obtained a BA in Indology at Leiden, an MPhil in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Oxford, and a PhD degree in Buddhist Studies back in Leiden. Jansen had a Dutch government grant (NWO) to research the relationship between Buddhism and law in pre-modern Tibet (2016-2022), prior to her appointment as tenured staff at Leiden University.
She is currently the PI of the ERC-funded project: Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection (2023-2028). Her monograph The Monastery Rules: Tibetan Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet came out in 2018 with University of California Press. In 2023, her first Buddhism-inspired children's book Don't Kill the Bugs came out with Bala Publications. She has worked as an interpreter and translator of Buddhist Tibetan since 2004.
Berthe Jansen
Kurtis Schaeffer
Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor of Religion and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a student of Buddhist history and culture, with a special interest in the spiritual literature of Tibet and the Himalayas. He is the author or editor of nine books, including the largest anthology of Tibetan literature in English and, most recently, a translation of the life of the Buddha. Schaeffer co-directs the half-century old Tibetan Buddhist studies graduate program at the University of Virginia and, with Martien Halvorson-Taylor, directs the Global Religion Lab at UVA.
Kurtis Schaeffer
James Robson
James Robson is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and Chan/Zen Buddhism.
Robson is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. His publications also include "Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism" (History of Religions 48:2), "Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia" (PMLA, 2010), and "A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian."
Robson joined the BDRC Board of Directors in February of 2017; prior to joining the BDRC Board Directors, Robson served as a member of the BDRC Board of Advisors, providing guidance on the preservation of East Asian materials.
James Robson
Andrew Quintman
Andrew Quintman is a scholar of Buddhist traditions in Tibet and the Himalaya, and Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University. He writes, teaches, and lectures about Buddhist literature and history, sacred geography and pilgrimage, and visual cultures of the wider Himalaya. His work addresses the intersections of Buddhist literary production, circulation, and reception; the reciprocal influences of textual and visual narratives; and the formation of religious subjectivities and institutional identities. His book, The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014), won the American Academy of Religion's 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University, and received honorable mention for the 2016 E. Gene Smith Book Prize at the Association of Asian Studies. In 2010, his new English translation of the Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics. He is currently writing a history of Drakar Taso Monastery that explores Buddhist religious and literary culture in the borderlands of Tibet and Nepal. He also co-directs a project on the Life of the Buddha through visual and literary materials associated with Tāranātha's seventeenth-century Jonang Phuntsokling Monastery in western Tibet.
Andrew Quintman
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (PhD, University of Virginia) is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author, editor, or translator of a number of works, including Prisoners of Shangri-La, The Madman's Middle Way, Buddhist Scriptures, and The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (with Robert Buswell). In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
Lama Jabb (མདའ་ཚན་བླ་མ་སྐྱབས)
Lama Jabb was born and brought up in the Dhatsen tribe, a nomadic community in Northeastern Tibet. He studied in Tibet, India and the UK and received his D.Phil at the University of Oxford. He is currently a Supernumerary Fellow in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies and the Head of the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Centre at Wolfson College, and Instructor in Tibetan at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
Lama Jabb's research and writing centre on the interplay between the Tibetan literary text and oral traditions, literary criticism, translation theory and practice, and contemporary Tibet. He is the author of the book Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation (2015) and many articles including "The Wandering Voice of Tibet: Life and Songs of Dubhe" (2019).
Lama Jabb (མདའ་ཚན་བླ་མ་སྐྱབས)
Lauran Hartley
Lauran Hartley is Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She also teaches regularly as Adjunct Assistant Professor for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and previously taught courses on Tibetan literature and religion at Indiana and Rutgers universities. In addition to co-editing the book Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008) and serving as Inner Asian Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, she has also published several literary translations and articles on Tibetan intellectual history and discourse from the eighteenth century to the present. She received her PhD at Indiana University in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies.
From 2007 to October 2021, Dr. Hartley served as Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University. In this capacity, she led several major projects, including a successful revision of the Library of Congress Tibetan Romanization Table; conversion of 20,000+ legacy records in the OCLC WorldCat database; a Tibetan Special Collections digitization project at Columbia University; and a range of conferences, such as "Tibetan Studies and the Social Sciences: Data, Tools, Maps and Archives;" "Tibetan Buddhist Networking in the 18th Century: Lives and Letters;" and "Linked Open Data in Buddhist and Tibetan Studies" (co-hosted with the Buddhist Digital Resource Center). Dr. Hartley worked on these projects and others in partnership with the Henry Luce Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, University of Toronto, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation. She is also co-founder—together with Susan Meinheit (Library of Congress) —of the Tibetan Resources Working Group.
Lauran Hartley
John Canti
John Canti is Editorial Chair and Director of 84000, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to translating all of the Buddha's words into modern languages, and to making them freely available to everyone, everywhere. Throughout his career, John has devoted himself to producing lucid, accurate translations of Buddhist texts and teachings for the benefit of all. He is a founding member of the Padmakara Translation Group, which has the principal aim of preserving and communicating major classic and contemporary Buddhist texts through translation into French, English, German and Spanish. John has completed two three-year retreats at Chanteloube, France (1980-1985, 1986-1989), and was awarded with the 2016 Khyentse Foundation Fellowship. John joined the BDRC Board of Directors in 2017.
John Canti
Marcus Bingenheimer
Marcus Bingenheimer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Temple University. He is a scholar of Buddhist Studies specializing in the history and literature of China and East Asia, often by using digital datasets and computational methods. He obtained an MA (Sinology) and Dr.phil (History of Religions) from Würzburg University and an MA (Communication Studies) from Nagoya University. His main research interests are the history of Buddhism in East Asia and early Buddhist sūtra literature. At Temple University he is also Academic Director of the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio where he helps to coordinate support for emerging digital scholarship technologies, such as Digital Humanities & Arts methods, 3D printing, or the use of VR-environments.
Marcus Bingenheimer
Daniel Aitken
Daniel is an experienced marketing professional with over a decade of insights gathered from corporate and consumer marketing executive roles working for multinationals such as Canon, and large financial firms such as Westpac. While pursuing his marketing career, Daniel continued to foster his life long interest in Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan language, and its literature. This has taken him across Australia, America, India, Nepal, and Tibet to pursue a deeper understanding of Buddhist theory and practice with masters from the living tradition. Daniel also reads Sanskrit and Tibetan and has a PhD in Buddhist Philosophy. He is currently a Publisher at Wisdom Publications.
Daniel Aitken
Nikko Odiseos
Nikko Odiseos came from a career in the information management sector of the technology industry, specializing in content management and enterprise search, finishing that phase of his career at Microsoft. He worked closely with a wide range of publishers on their business strategies around digitization and dissemination. Prior to that he had studied on and subsequently was on staff on Antioch's Buddhist Studies Program in Bodhgaya, India for several years, immersing himself in many diverse Buddhist traditions.
Nikko has been the President of Shambhala Publications since 2010, overseeing its acquisition of several other publishers including Snow Lion Publications. He sits on the board of several other Buddhist organizations. Nikko lives in Colorado and spends 1-2 months in Asia every year.
Nikko Odiseos
Lisa Schubert
Lisa Schubert has spent most of her career either directing, developing, or coordinating projects. She recently stepped down as VP, Cathedral Programming & External Relations at the Cathedral of St John the Divine (2008 – 2023) in New York, where she was charged with creating an institutional framework for funding, staffing, and implementing a multi-disciplinary arts program and an ongoing menu of events and projects of civic engagement in the humanities. Prior to joining the Cathedral, Lisa worked for the Rubin Museum of Art, which she joined as the first staff member at the inception in 1998. She worked closely with the founders to refine and develop the original concept and put together the "start-up" team. Her career has involved most aspects of cultural administration including policy, strategic planning, public education, programming, operations, administration, communications, and development. Lisa also serves on the boards of Food & Water Watch, a national organization, with international chapters, founded to protect our food, water and climate; and the Early Music Foundation, which fosters public understanding and appreciation of western culture through historically-informed performances of music from the 11th through the 18th centuries.