Associate Professor, Centre of Buddhist Studies, Faculty of Arts, HKU |
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With expertise in the fields of Tibetan, Himalayan, and Buddhist Studies I have previously researched the cultural and religious interactions between Islam and Tibet, and the history of religions along the trade routes between the Mediterranean area and south Asia in antiquity. During this time, I lead summer schools and convened a series of international conferences and workshops on Eurasian religious interactions. I have also conducted extended field-research on Tibetan Buddhist infrastructures, their histories, sites, and canonical manuscripts in the west and east of the Indian Himalayas. In the BRINFAITH collaborative project, I am focusing on regional and transregional Buddhist hubs and religious mobilities along the Indo-Tibetan frontiers of the Himalayan massifs, the southern Silk routes that connected and separated China with India since ancient times. My scope is to examine in which ways they have contributed to the unfolding narrative of the BRI in these regions, and how they are represented in colonial and post-colonial discourses of empires and nation-states struggling with physical territory and subjective memory as they craft new roads and alignments across old religious networks and ethnic borders.
