As long as I can remember, India has tugged at my heart. In middle school, I was given my first book about Buddhism; in high school, I devoured novels by Rushdie and Lahiri; and in college, I registered for every class I could about South Asian religious and artistic traditions. I finally traveled to India for my semester abroad to participate in a Tibetan Studies program, which also brought me to Nepal and Tibet. Those months spent immersed in Tibetan communities and within the Himalayan landscape were ineffably life-changing. This study-abroad experience fundamentally impacted my professional and academic trajectory over the last ten years, from my undergraduate thesis to my work at the Rubin Museum of Art to my graduate studies at Yale and now at University of Michigan. I was attracted to the doctoral program here, in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures, because it is clearly committed to interdisciplinarity, as evidenced by the diversity of intellectual interests and scholarly pursuits among the graduate students and faculty. Born in the field, cultivated in a museum, and refined in religious studies programs, my own research interests are thus at home in ALC, which fosters a positive, stimulating environment where I have been encouraged, inspired, and challenged. I have focused generally on Buddhist Studies and Material Culture, with a regional concentration in Tibet and the Western Himalayas. Over the last three years, my coursework, exams, and research in the field have led me to a dissertation topic that utilizes artistic evidence, in concert with textual sources, to better understand the early Buddhist history of the western Himalayan region of India (ie Ladakh and northern Himachal Pradesh). Large-scale carvings of buddhas and bodhisattvas located on mountainsides and boulders are at the center of my project, as they may be the earliest material evidence of Buddhism in this area. While it is my intention that my research contribute to the preservation of a cultural heritage threatened by modern development and climate change, I believe teaching and museum work to be the most important goals of my own education. I hope that by sharing the cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism or the artistic innovations of Kashmiri craftsmen or the lives of Buddhist women, I can encourage students of all kinds to think a little differently about their world, and to translate, however variously, this new perspective into their own lives and work.

I work on the modern transformation of Taiwanese popular religion from the colonial period to the present. Originally trained in cultural anthropology, my fieldwork in central Taiwan cuts across different forms of popular tradition - performance, ritual, and oral history - in Chinese religious festivals, including cross-strait pilgrimages and different temple ceremonies.