Charlene Makley

Charlene Makley is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work has explored the history and cultural politics of state-building, state-led development and Buddhist revival among Tibetans in China’s restive frontier zone (SE Qinghai and SW Gansu provinces) since 1992. Her analyses draw especially on methodologies from linguistic and economic anthropology, gender and media studies, and studies of religion and ritual that unpack the semiotic and pragmatic specificities of intersubjective communication, exchange, personhood and value. Her first book, The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China, was published by UCalif Press in 2007. Her second book, The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood and Power among Tibetans in China, published in 2018 by Cornell University Press and the Weatherhead East Asia Institute at Columbia University, is an ethnography of state-local relations in the historically Tibetan region of Rebgong (SE Qinghai province) in the wake of China’s Great Open the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. Her most recent project is collaborative oral historical research on the tenth Panchen Lama’s post-prison tours of Amdo in the 1980s. As part of that work, she is a member of the Amdo Translation Collective (མདོ་སྨད་ལོ་ཙཱ་མཐུན་ཚོགས), an international group of Tibet scholars who work collaboratively on translating texts and other media from early post-Mao and contemporary Amdo into English, in order to make them accessible to larger publics.

Kevin Buckelew

Kevin Buckelew is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, and specializes in the study of Chinese Buddhism. His book in progress focuses on the Chan Buddhist tradition in Song-dynasty China, and asks how Chan Buddhists understood Chan mastery to entail not just skill in meditation (as the word chan literally implies), but the full realization of buddhahood. Thematically, his research explores how religious identities take shape and assume social authority, how materiality and embodiment figure into Buddhist soteriology, and how Buddhists have grappled with the problem of human agency. He has performed research in China, Taiwan, and Japan with the support of grants from the Fulbright program and the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai.

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in Buddhist Studies at Northwestern University. His dissertation research considers the gendered dimensions of tantric ritual, narrative, and ideology in Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, with particular interest in the role of masculinity in tantric Buddhist subject formation. His dissertation focuses on the life and writings of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the deer-hunting, alcohol-drinking, gun-wielding tantric master from the Golok region of eastern Tibet. He holds an M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, an M.Div. in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Naropa University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Georgetown. He is advised by Sarah Jacoby.