Welcoming Dagmar Schwerk to UBC

The Himalaya Program is delighted to welcome Dagmar Schwerk to UBC as the Khyentse Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Tibetan Buddhist Studies. She will be teaching in the Department of Asian Studies.

While at UBC, she will turn her doctoral thesis into a monograph (title: A Timely Message from the Cave: The Mahāmudrā Doctrine and Intellectual Agenda of dGe-bshes dGe-’dun-rin-chen (1926–1997), the Sixty-Ninth rJe-mkhan-po of Bhutan) and begin a new research project on Tibetan Buddhism, in particular on identity- and nation-building processes in eighteenth-century Bhutan. She will also be teaching Himalaya-related classes, information on which you can find here [ADD LINK].

Dagmar Schwerk studied Tibetology, classical Indology, and political science at the University of Hamburg’s Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies and Department of Social Sciences (Germany). Focusing on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, Madhyamaka philosophy, she obtained her M.A. in 2012.

In 2017 she completed her Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies (University of Hamburg) with a dissertation on the reception history of the longstanding controversy concerning the Mahāmudrā doctrine and meditative system in the Bhutanese Drukpa Kagyud school between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, she analyzed the Mahāmudrā interpretation by a renowned master from this school, the sixty-ninth Je Khenpo Gendun Rinchen (1926–97). She also first analyzed and made accessible records of the life and works of Je Khenpo Gendun Rinchen to a broader academic audience.

Before coming to UBC, she worked as a short-term postdoctoral fellow on a research project titled “Bhutan in Transition. Metamorphosis and Institutionalization of Buddhist Concepts” in an international and interdisciplinary research group at the University of Leipzig (Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” http://www.multiple-secularities.de/team/dagmar-schwerk/).

Her research and teaching expertise cover Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan and Bhutanese intellectual, political, and social history—particularly between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In her current research activities, she is especially interested in Buddhist conceptions of state, governance, social structure and civil society, as well as applied Buddhist ethics in secular contexts such as economics and education in Asia and the West.

Welcome to UBC, Dagmar!

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