Jacob Dalton

University of California, Berkeley

Jacob Dalton, Khyentse Foundation Distinguished University Professor in Tibetan Buddhism, holds a joint appointment in the Departments of South and Southeast Asian Studies, where he Department Chair, and East Asian Languages and Cultures. After working for three years (2002-05) as a researcher with the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, he taught at Yale University (2005-2008) before moving to Berkeley. He works on tantric ritual, Nyingma religious history, paleography, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is the author of The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), The Gathering of Intentions: A History of a Tibetan Tantra (Columbia University Press, 2016), and co-author of Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library (Brill, 2006). He is currently writing a study on tantric ritual manuals from the Dunhuang archive.

Brandon Dotson

Georgetown University

Brandon Dotson has worked and taught at Oxford University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of California at Santa Barbara, LMU München, and now Georgetown University. His research on ritual, history, narrative, and text has taken him to Nepal, Tibet, and China. Dotson’s PhD thesis (2007) is a study of Tibet’s earliest extant corpus iuris, and his first monograph (2009) is a translation and study of Tibet’s earliest historical and bureaucratic record, the Old Tibetan Annals. His postdoctoral research focused on the origins of Tibetan historical narrative and its relationship with ritual narrative, including divination. The results of this research include an annotated translation of the Old Tibetan Chronicle, Tibet’s first and only chronicle epic, which formed the basis of Dotson’s Habilitationsschrift at LMU München in 2013.