Janet Gyatso
Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs
On Leave
Spring 2023, Fall 2023
Education
- BA, MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley
Profile
Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her 2015 book Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press) focuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan medicine in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. Her other books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet.
She has also been writing on sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination movement in Buddhism. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary revelation in Buddhism; lineage, memory, and authorship; the philosophy of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Her current writing concerns the phenomenology of living well with animals and related ethical issues and practices.
Gyatso was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2018. She was president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies from 2000 to 2006, and co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion from 2004 to 2010. She teaches lecture courses and advanced seminars on Buddhist history, ritual, and ideas, and on Tibetan literary practices and religious history.
In both teaching and writing she draws on cultural and literary theory, and endeavors to widen the spectrum of intellectual resources for the understanding of Buddhist and Tibetan history. She is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Committee on the Study of Religion, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. She is also involved in the development of a new track for the training of Buddhist lay ministers and leaders in the master of divinity program at HDS.
Gyatso taught at Amherst College before coming to Harvard as the Divinity School's first Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies. In July 2014 she became HDS associate dean for faculty and academic affairs.
Courses
View HDS courses taught by Janet Gyatso in the my.harvard Course Search.
Also view FAS courses taught by Janet Gyatso. (HDS students: for jointly offered and reading and research courses, please enroll in the HDS version of the course.)
Selected publications
- Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015)
- Women in Tibet: Past and Present (Columbia University Press, 2006)
- Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton University Press, 1999)
- In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (SUNY Press, 1992)
Assistant
Related news
- Video: Being-With Animals in the Thick Present - HDS Animism Group, February 26, 2020.
- Keynote Speech on Translation and Transmission
- Video: With Pema Bhum on the Politics of Poetry in Tibet
- Video: His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa on Full Ordination for Tibetan Women
- March 2017 update: The Gyalwa Karmapa's further steps on full ordination for Tibetan Buddhist Women
- Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Gift Will Support Groundbreaking Buddhist Ministry Initiative at Harvard Divinity School
- Faculty Notes and Books - October 2012
See also
- Thanks to Gene Smith
- That Was Then, This Is Now
- 2003 HDS Convocation address (PDF)
- Buddhist Ministry Initiative
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