Karma Lekshe Tsomo

The Venerable Karma Lekshe Tsomo, a specialist in Buddhist studies, has taught at USD since 2000. She offers classes in Buddhist Thought and Culture, World Religions, Comparative Religious Ethics, Religious and Political Identities in the Global Community, and Negotiating Religious Diversity in India. Her research interests include women in Buddhism, death and dying, Buddhist feminist ethics, Buddhism and bioethics, religion and politics, Buddhist social ethics, and Buddhist transnationalism. She integrates scholarship and social activism through the Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women and Jamyang Foundation, an innovative education project for women in developing countries, with 15 schools in the Indian Himalayas, Bangladesh, and Laos.

Damchö Diana Finnegan

Damchö Diana Finnegan holds a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dissertation on gender and ethics in narratives about early Buddhist nuns. Her translation work centers on Buddhist narrative in Sanskrit and Tibetan, while ranging widely across other genres. Damchö co-founded and heads Dharmadatta Community (Comunidad Dharmadatta), a Spanish-speaking Dharma community with a presence across Latin America, and an online study institute serving hundreds of Latinx students each semester. In teaching on the life stories of Buddhist women for this community, she has been exploring the territory where translation and storytelling meet. For over a decade, she has lived in community with a small group of other nuns, first in India, then in Mexico and now in rural Virginia. She is currently working on a book on the sevenfold method for generating bodhicitta, asking how it shifts when women’s experiences are placed at the center of the practice.

Choela Tenzin Dadon

Choela Tenzin Dadon was born in Bhutan and became a nun in 1993 in Dharamsala, India after completing high school in Bhutan. She later received her śrāmaṇerikā ordination from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 1999. Tsunma Tenzin left her home country to pursue a systematic monastic education which was, and to a large extent still is, not available to nuns in Bhutan. Tsunma spent 13 years (1993-2006) at Jamyang Choling Institute for Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, India studying Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan language and literature.

Janet Gyatso

B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley

Janet Gyatso (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley) is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary and 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. She is currently working on Indic poetics in Tibetan literature, and a book and set of video shorts on animal ethics.

Ani Tenzin Choyang

Ani Tenzin Choyang was born in Tibet and traveled to India to study Buddhist philosophy in 2002. In 2003, she enrolled in a Nunnery where she studied for seventeen years and was recently honored with a Rapjampa degree. Over the past 17 years she has had many opportunities to study academic science through ETSI: at Emory University as a Tenzin Gyatso scholar and in summer and winter training programs in India where she also served as a translator. She is currently serving on a research internship program in Northwestern University.

Sarah H. Jacoby

Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois

Sarah H. Jacoby is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She specializes in Tibetan Buddhist studies, with research interests in Buddhist revelation (gter ma), religious auto/biography, Tibetan literature, gender and sexuality, the history of emotions, and the history of eastern Tibet. She is the author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro(Columbia University Press, 2014), co-author of Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-editor of Buddhism Beyond the Monastery: Tantric Practices and their Performers in Tibet and the Himalayas (Brill, 2009). She has recently published articles on motherhood in Tibetan Buddhism, and currently she is working on a full Tibetan-English translation of Sera Khandro’s autobiography, among other projects. At Northwestern she teaches a range of Buddhist Studies courses for both undergraduate and graduate students.