The Making of Medical History

This essay addresses the transmission of medical knowledge in Tibet spanning a period of roughly six hundred years. I begin with an overview of several of the major traditions of Tibetan medicine during this period, emphasizing both how intertwined they are with each other and how connected they are to contemporaneous Buddhist traditions. I then …

Mapping an Epic

This program’s general research goal – to map the King Gesar epic’s “therapeutic geographies” as a way of studying the intersections between religion and medicine in Inner Asia – was organized around three intertwined research objectives. We planned (1) to examine episodes in this vast epic tradition that depict healing acts or geographic sites that …

Himalayan Borderlands

This five-year project (2017-2022) on mountain cultures and travel histories in the Eastern Himalaya aims to explore religious expression in written and oral depictions of Himalayan travel. In this project, we are exploring how mountain spaces are constructed by inflections of power and transnational forces, how religious practices interact with the environment, and how stories …