Notes on Contributors
Filippo Brambilla is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna, Austria, where he is completing his dissertation on the Jo nang scholar Tshogs gnyis rgya mtsho (1880–1940) and works as a researcher in the FWF funded project “Emptiness of Other in the Early Jo nang Tradition.” He holds a Master’s degree in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Asia from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Brambilla spent long periods of study and fieldwork in China (Southwest Minzu University and Minzu University of China) and Eastern Tibet.
Gabriele Coura is a Lecturer at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. During her BA studies at the University of Hamburg, she worked as a cataloger of Tibetan texts at the library of the Asia-Africa-Institute, and as a freelance contributor for TBRC (now BDRC). In 2014, she completed her MA in Tibetology at the University of Vienna with a thesis entitled “The Life and Works of the Thirteenth Karma-pa bDud-'dul-rdo-rje (1733–1797).” Currently, she is working on her dissertation “dPal-spungs Monastery from the 18th to the Early 20th Century: A Buddhist Place of Education and Its Similarities and Differences with Benedictine Monastic Institutions.”
Douglas Duckworth is Professor at Temple University in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Mipam on Buddha-Nature: The Ground of the Nyingma Tradition (SUNY 2008) and Jamgön Mipam: His Life and Teachings (Shambhala 2011). He also introduced and translated Distinguishing the Views and Philosophies: Illuminating Emptiness in a Twentieth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Classic by Bötrül (SUNY 2011). His latest works include Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature (OUP 2019) and a translation of an overview of the Wisdom Chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva by Künzang Sönam, entitled The Profound Reality of Interdependence (OUP 2019).
Adam C. Krug is an Instructor of Religious Studies at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee. His forthcoming monograph contains a study and translations of The Seven Siddhi Texts (Grub pa sde bdun), a corpus of texts composed by seven Indian mahāsiddhas that is widely recognized in Tibetan traditions as the earliest collection of Indian treatises on the tantric practices of the “Great Seal” or Mahāmudrā. Dr. Krug has also published on a number of other topics such as Buddhist medical demonology, 'Phags pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan’s earliest work on the “twin system” (tshul gnyis) of governance, and modern appropriations of Tibetan Buddhism in American pop culture.
Klaus-Dieter Mathes is a Professor and the Head of the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. His current research deals with “emptiness of other” (gzhan stong) in the early Jonang tradition. He obtained a Ph.D. from Marburg University with a translation and study of the Yogācāra text Dharmadharmatāvibhāga (published in 1996 in the series Indica et Tibetica). The habilitation thesis was published by Wisdom Publications under the title A Direct Path to the Buddha Within: Gö Lotsāwa’s Mahāmudrā Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhāga (Boston: 2008) and the latest work, Mahāmudrā in India and Tibet (coedited with Roger R. Jackson) was published by Brill in 2020. He is also a regular contributor to the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies.
Giacomella Orofino is a Professor at the University of Naples “L’ Orientale” in the Department of Asian African and Mediterranean Studies. She is President of the Italian Association of Tibetan, Himalayan and Mongolian Studies (AISTHiM) and President of the Centre for Buddhist Studies of the University “L’Orientale” that promotes the knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, literature, art and culture in an interdisciplinary perspective. She has published extensively on various themes in the study of Tibetan religious history and literature, including the doctrines of Kālacakra, the Gcod tradition, the history of Bon, the folk and modern Tibetan literature. Her recent publications include the edition of Wind Horses. Tibetan, Himalayan and Mongolian Studies, Series Minor, LXXXVIII (Napoli: 2019).
Rachel H. Pang is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Davidson College. Her research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist life writing, poetry, nonsectarianism, and the collected works of the poet-saint Zhabs dkar tshogs drug rang grol (1781–1851). Dr. Pang’s articles are published in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Himalaya, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Numen, and Revue d’ Etudes Tibétaines. Her translations of Zhabs dkar’s poems also appear in Faults of Meat (ed. Geoffrey Barstow) and Longing to Awaken (eds. Holly Gayley and Dominique Townsend).
Adam S. Pearcey completed his Ph.D. at SOAS, University of London, in 2018 with a thesis entitled A Greater Perfection? Scholasticism, Comparativism and Issues of Sectarian Identity in Early 20th Century Writings on rDzogs-chen. He is the founder-director of Lotsāwa House (
Frédéric Richard holds a BA and MA in Religious Studies from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and has studied Tibetan language at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute of Kathmandu University. He is currently doing a Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the Institute of History and Anthropology of Religions of the University of Lausanne, and has spent one year as a visiting graduate student at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna with a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research is about the relation between politics and religion in Tibet through the Shugs ldan controversy.