Background

Bryan J. Cuevas (Ph.D., University of Virginia) joined the Department of Religion faculty in Fall 2000. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Asian religious traditions, specializing in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism, Tibetan history, language, and culture. His principal research interests focus on Tibetan history and biography, Buddhist magic and sorcery, and the politics of ritual power in premodern Tibetan societies.

Dr. Cuevas has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and has held visiting appointments at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and Emory University. His research has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), as well as grants from public and private endowments.

His recent articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of Asian Studies, History of Religions, Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, and Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, as well as contributions to several anthologies on Tibetan Buddhist literature, history, art, and ritual studies.

Dr. Cuevas is currently accepting graduate students (M.A. and Ph.D.) interested in pursuing research topics in Tibetan and Buddhist studies for the 2023-24 academic year.

Books

• The Rwa pod and Other 'Lost' Works of Rwa lo tsā ba's Vajrabhairava Tradition: A Catalogue of Recently Acquired Tibetan Manuscripts from Mongolia and Khams and Their Significance (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde no. 101. Arbeitkreis für tibetische und buddhistische Studien, University of Vienna, 2021).
• The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat: The Life of Ra Lotsawa (Penguin Classics, 2015). This book received a Shantarakshita Award for Excellence in Translation from the Tsadra Foundation in 2017.
• Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet (Oxford University Press, 2008; paperback edition, 2012).
• The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, co-edited with Jacqueline I. Stone (Kuroda Studies in East Buddhism Series 20. University of Hawai'i Press, 2007; paperback edition, 2011; Indian edition published by Motilal Banarsidass, 2010).
• Power, Politics, and the Reinvention of Tradition: Tibet in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, co-edited with Kurtis R. Schaeffer (Brill, 2006).
• The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford University Press, 2003; paperback edition, 2006).

Courses

Fall 2023

• REL3340: Buddhist Tradition
• REL3348: Buddhism & The Mythology of Evil (Honors)

Spring 2023

• REL3340: Buddhist Tradition
• REL4359/RLG5354: Tantric Buddhism
• RLG6298: Tibetan Bibliography