Kurtis R. Schaeffer

Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He co-directs the Tibetan Buddhist studies graduate program at UVA. Kurtis was first introduced to the field of book history in a course on the history of the book in America offered in the late 1990s by David Hall at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2000. Since then his work has been impacted by the synergy created in book history between intellectual, social, and material modes of investigation and interpretation. This impact culminated in the publication of The Culture of the Book in Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2009). Kurtis is the author, editor, or translator of eight other books, including recently The Life of the Buddha by Tenzin Chögyel (Penguin Classics, 2015), The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2012), and Sources of Tibetan Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2012), which is the largest English anthology of Tibetan literature published to date. Among his recent projects, he has just co-created a literary and visual life of the Buddha based upon a four-century old mural of the Buddha’s story located in Western Tibet (lifeofthebuddha.org). He is currently completing a collection of Buddhist meditation literature for Penguin Classics. You can learn more about Kurtis’ work at the Department of Religious Studies (https://virginia.academia.edu/KurtisSchaeffer), and read some of his articles at https://virginia.academia.edu/KurtisSchaeffer.