Holly Gayley

University of Colorado, Boulder

Holly Gayley is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. With a passion for translation, her research examines the revitalization of Buddhism on the Tibetan plateau since the 1980s with a special interest in issues of gender, agency and identity in contemporary Buddhist literature by Tibetan masters and cleric-scholars. She became interested in the academic study of Buddhism through her travels among Tibetan communities in India, Nepal, and China, and completed her M.A. in Buddhist Studies at Naropa University in 2000 and Ph.D. at Harvard University in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies in 2009. She is author of Inseparable across Lifetimes: The Lives and Love Letters of the Tibetan Visionaries Namtrul Rinpoche and Khandro Tāre Lhamo (Shambhala, 2019) and Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2016) and co-editor of A Gathering of Brilliant Moons: Practice Advice from the Rimé Masters of Tibet (Wisdom Publications, 2017). Her articles on an ethical reform movement spearheaded by cleric-scholars at Larung Buddhist Academy in Serta include "The Compassionate Treatment of Animals: A Contemporary Buddhist Approach in Eastern Tibet" (Journal of Religious Ethics, 2017), "Controversy over Buddhist Ethical Reform: A Secular Critique of Clerical Authority in the Tibetan Blogosphere" (Himalaya Journal, 2016), "Non-Violence as a Shifting Signifier on the Tibetan Plateau" (Contemporary Buddhism, 2016 with Padma 'tsho).

Janet Gyatso

Harvard University

Janet Gyatso (BA, MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. She has recently completed a new book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, which focuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan medicine in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries.

Dominique Townsend

Bard College

Dominique Townsend is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. She received her BA from Barnard College, MTS from Harvard Divinity School and PhD from Columbia University in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research is stimulated by productive tensions in Buddhist cultures, such as the relationship between the cultivation of the arts and renunciation. Dominique’s primary interests include Buddhist poetics, pedagogy, and institutionalized charisma. Her current project, based on her dissertation research, focuses on aesthetics and cosmopolitanism in Tibetan Buddhism, with a particular focus on the history of Mindrölling Monastery.

Lama Jabb

Oxford University

Lama Jabb was born and brought up in the Dhatsen tribe, a nomadic community from Northeastern Tibet. He completed his primary education in Tibet. Midway through the secondary education he left Tibet to attend a Tibetan refugee school in India. Since 1995 he has lived in United Kingdom. Lama Jabb received BA Honours degree in Political Science and MSc in International Relations from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He completed his D.Phil in modern Tibetan literature at the University of Oxford in 2013. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Wolfson College. He has recently been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in Tibetan Literature at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Lama Jabb’s research interests are in, among other things, modern Tibetan literature, traditional allegorical tales, the interplay between the Tibetan literary text and oral traditions, and the theory and practice of translation. Adopting a keen historical consciousness and an interdisciplinary approach he explores Tibetan creative writing alongside national identity and other socio-political issues embedded within it. He also teaches Tibetan language and literature to graduate students at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. He participates in scholarly discussions on contemporary Tibetan issues in both academic and public forums. His publications include his book Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation (2015).

Marcus Perman

Tsadra Foundation

Marcus Perman is the Director of Research at Tsadra Foundation, a nonprofit trust established to provide vital funding for the combined study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in the west. Marcus graduated from St. Lawrence University with honors in Psychology and Philosophy and graduated from Naropa University with an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on Tibetan and Sanskrit languages. He studied extensively at Nitartha Institute and from 2007 to 2008 he studied at Tibet University in Lhasa. Marcus has been developing a specialized library for Tibetan Buddhist translators in Boulder, Colorado and is the organizer of the Translation & Transmission Conference series.

Kurtis Schaeffer

University of Virginia

Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a student of the literary history and culture of Tibet, with a particular interest in poetry, life writing, narrative, and contemplative literature from across the Tibetan plateau. His books include Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun; The Culture of the Book in Tibet, and (with Matthew Kapstein and Gray Tuttle) Sources of Tibetan Tradition, which is the largest anthology of Tibetan Buddhist literature in translation to date. Most recently he published The Life of the Buddha in the Penguin Classics series, which includes a translation of a beautiful Bhutanese story of the Buddha from Bhutan’s golden age of literature. He is currently finishing a translation of select works of Tibetan meditation literature, also for the Penguin Classics series.