My work contributes to a growing body of scholarship within Tibetan Studies that bridges disciplinary divisions—between religion, art history, and literary studies—thus enabling an examination of figures, texts, and objects that complicate conventional genres and dominant narratives. Such research necessitates an interdisciplinary methodology and a diverse archive. In the field of Tibetan art history, for instance, the primary focus has long been on identifying iconographic forms, tracing the development of style, and defining masterworks. Recent movements within both art history and religious studies, however, seek to challenge these traditional approaches by bridging disciplinary boundaries, and looking beyond masters and masterpieces. To complement textual translation and visual analysis, I work across media and read across genres—biography, commentary, instructional manuals, and artist’s guides— establishing the historical context, authorial innovation, and political motivations of a work’s composition. In my curatorial work and my research, described at length below, I further seek to bring religious art and literature down to earth, from the spiritual to the human, from the connoisseurial to the practical. By shifting the study of Tibetan Buddhist art and literature toward the quotidian—from deities in mandalas to monks in monasteries—I seek to expand what constitutes scriptural commentary, Tibetan Buddhist art, and the relationship between text and image. I contribute the fields of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies by highlighting the didactic and ideological functions of art and literature, thus elevating the practical to the artistic, and the artistic to the political.

Education

PhD, Buddhist Studies, University of Michigan, Department of Asian Languages & Cultures, 2022

Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, University of Michigan, 2017

MAR, Asian Religions, Yale Divinity School, 2012

BA, Religion and History of Art, Middlebury College, 2006

CURRENT RESEARCH

Pictures to Live By: Uncovering an Iconography of the Tibetan Buddhist Monastic Code

The focus of my current research is a heretofore unexamined Tibetan text and the murals it inspired, which integrate word and images in ways unseen elsewhere. Composed around 1922 by the largely forgotten Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876-1933), this text records his commentary on the Buddhist monastic code. It is a conventional project for a Buddhist master, yet this work employs an innovative commentarial apparatus: illustrations. These pictures do not merely illustrate the text, however, but function as careful visual exegeses that synthesize the details of canonical commentaries and incorporate elements of Tibetan monasticism. The written and visual elements of the woodblock-printed text were first reproduced in a mural at Lhasa’s Ramoche Temple during a renovation ordered by the Dalai Lama at the time of the text’s publication. Having survived an assassination plot, foreign invasion, and prolonged exile, the Dalai Lama strived to secure his domain through temple renovation and institutional reform, based on models of Buddhist kingship and traditions of state protection. Central to this political undertaking was the purification of the monastic community, which, I argue, he sought to accomplish by creating accessible, pictorial exegeses of the monastic code that established a new iconographic system for portraying monastic life and visually transmitting monastic rules.

The meaning and utility of the Dalai Lama’s commentary and its mural extended beyond his political aims, however, and over the next century, the mural was painted at several other sites within and around Lhasa, including the famous Potala Palace, as well as at monasteries in Ladakh and Spiti in the western Himalayan region of modern India. Because the murals at these Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are without an established tradition, I further argue that they present an artistic genre previously undefined and an iconographic source-text hitherto unexplored. From a singular work of timely political importance, the mural has become a significant series of artworks that together constitute a unique iconographic system for depicting monastic life. With this project, I reorient the study of Tibetan sacred literature and religious art away from the purely spiritual, offering a new analysis of their relationship as one that is deeply interpretive and ideological, not merely illustrative.

Monastery Museums across Asia

The de-sanctification of sacred objects—the consequence of cultural redefinition and relocation—has long been a governing principle in the formation of secular museums in Europe and America; but more and more, curators are making efforts to mitigate this iconoclastic effect by employing creative strategies that aim to resolve the dynamic relationship between sacred object, secular setting, and diverse public. This often involves restoring cultural or religious context to works through exhibition displays and multimedia cultural performances, as well as engaging heritage communities in exhibition planning. But what happens when this dynamic between temple and museum, sacred and secular, is reversed?

Several Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh, India have built museums, thus introducing a secular space into the sacred environs of a religious institution. In a case-study of Chemrey Monastery Museum, to be published in a forthcoming volume, I explore the theoretical issues underlying museological practices that seek to reconcile the ontological and ideological transformations that occur when monasteries and museums mix. A museum, I argue, is a unique space where competing identities, ideologies, and perceptual experiences can coexist. I look to Christina Kreps’ “appropriate museology” as the preferred method for maintaining the authority and agency of local caretakers and stakeholders, while introducing modern museum practices. This approach seeks to incorporate local knowledge, as well as indigenous traditions of displaying and caring for objects, into exhibition development and implementation.

As more and more museums are built in Ladakh’s monasteries, and the push to formalize these institutions as keepers of a threatened cultural heritage becomes stronger. In the next phase of this project, I explore the practical and theoretical issues surrounding monastery museums more deeply, contextualizing them within the history of museums in India specifically and Asia more broadly, and locating them within the movement toward heritage preservation across Asia.