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David Germano

Professor

E-mail:
Phone: 434-924-6728

Address:
Department of Religious Studies
PO Box 400126
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4126

Research Interests

In addition to teaching in the Department of Religious Studies, where he has advised many doctoral students since 1992, Germano is co-director of the Tibet Center (www.uvatibetcenter.org) and director of SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives – www.shanti.virginia.edu) at the University of Virginia. He also is the editor of the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, the official journal of the main international organization of Tibetan Studies, and is the founder and director of the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL, www.thlib.org), the largest international initiative using digital technology to facilitate collaboration in Tibetan Studies across disciplines.

His personal research interests are focused on the Nyingma and Bön lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, tantric traditions overall, Buddhist philosophy, and Tibetan historical literature and concerns, particularly from the eighth to fifteenth centuries. He also does research on the contemporary state of Tibetan religion in relationship to China, and non-monastic yogic communities in cultural Tibet, and has broad intellectual interests in international philosophical and literary traditions, including hermeneutics, phenomenology, literary criticism, systems theory, and so forth.

Germano has developed a deep expertise in the use of digital technology to facilitate innovation in teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. In the context of THL, he has worked extensively on digital initiatives with geographical data, videos, images, dictionaries, gazetteers, and much more in partnership with scores of scholars from diverse disciplines – geography, linguistics, history, literary studies, environmental science, film studies, and others. With SHANTI, he has broadened this work to focus with others on building a community-based model for mainstreaming digital technology at UVa so as to enable innovation in teaching, research, publication, and engagement. Finally, Germano has been a leader at building academic collaborations with Tibetan institutions, and has facilitated a broad array of exchange programs that have included language instruction, oral traditions documentation, geography, tourism, education, library development and much more. In this context, he has been an advocate of engaged scholarship which actively explores the way in which scholarship impacts on, and empowers, the communities with which universities are involved in complex relationships. This includes the exploration of alternative paradigms of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination.

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts (BA), University of Notre Dame
  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Wisconsin System : Madison

Research Projects

  • Tibetan & Himalayan Library
    • Project Sponsored By: U.S. Department Of Education - Post Secondary Ed.
    • 10/01/2009 - 09/30/2013
    • Award Amount: $380,000.00
  • AS-RELI Sustainable Tibet
    • Project Sponsored by: Winrock Internation
    • 12/10/2009 - 11/30/2013
    • Award Amount: $175,662.00
  • AS-RELI Kham V
    • Project Sponsored By: U.S. Department Of State
    • 09/30/201 - 12/31/2011
    • Award Amount: $224,000.00

    Overview

    In addition to teaching in the Department of Religious Studies, where he has advised many doctoral students since 1992, Germano is co-director of the Tibet Center (www.uvatibetcenter.org) and director of SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives – www.shanti.virginia.edu) at the University of Virginia. He also is the editor of the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, the official journal of the main international organization of Tibetan Studies, and is the founder and director of the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL, www.thlib.org), the largest international initiative using digital technology to facilitate collaboration in Tibetan Studies across disciplines. His personal research interests are focused on the Nyingma and Bön lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, tantric traditions overall, Buddhist philosophy, and Tibetan historical literature and concerns, particularly from the eighth to fifteenth centuries. He also does research on the contemporary state of Tibetan religion in relationship to China, and non-monastic yogic communities in cultural Tibet, and has broad intellectual interests in international philosophical and literary traditions, including hermeneutics, phenomenology, literary criticism, systems theory, and so forth. Germano has developed a deep expertise in the use of digital technology to facilitate innovation in teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. In the context of THL, he has worked extensively on digital initiatives with geographical data, videos, images, dictionaries, gazetteers, and much more in partnership with scores of scholars from diverse disciplines – geography, linguistics, history, literary studies, environmental science, film studies, and others. With SHANTI, he has broadened this work to focus with others on building a community-based model for mainstreaming digital technology at UVa so as to enable innovation in teaching, research, publication, and engagement. Finally, Germano has been a leader at building academic collaborations with Tibetan institutions, and has facilitated a broad array of exchange programs that have included language instruction, oral traditions documentation, geography, tourism, education, library development and much more. In this context, he has been an advocate of engaged scholarship which actively explores the way in which scholarship impacts on, and empowers, the communities with which universities are involved in complex relationships. This includes the exploration of alternative paradigms of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination.

    Current Projects

    Germano is currently returning to work on a fourfold set of works that constitute a comprehensive analysis of the Great Perfection Seminal Heart (rdzogs chen snying thig) tradition from its formation to its full expression in the fourteenth century with the corpus of Longchenpa, one of the greatest of all Tibetan Buddhist authors. This includes a translation of his major work, The Treasury of Words and Meanings (tshig don mdzod), a historical study, a philosophical study, and a literary study of the tradition. He is also working on a powerful cultural geographical system that is collaboratively publishing scholarship on historical and contemporary Tibetan and Himalayan places, communities, and cultural traditions across many disciplines, as well as fundamental scholarly resources – analytical data on places, maps, images, videos, bibliographies, and more. This publishing platform includes an extremely powerful Gazeteer, GIS-based mapping, and associated multimedia repositories. This includes working on a site involving the promotion of community-based tourism in Tibet, which aims to connection scholarly production of knowledge on Tibetan places and communities to actual benefit to the communities involved. Germano is also involved with coordinating others at a larger project at participatory knowledge production that enables Tibetans and Tibetan communities to be fully empowered agents in the global network of how knowledge gets produced about their own places and traditions. He is co-directing an initiative on the Tibetan Buddhist canon, which includes a detailed catalog, scholarly editions of the scriptures themselves, scans of the manuscripts, and scholarly summaries and analysis. This includes multiple editions of the Kangyur and Tengyur, but also ongoing work on the Nyingma Gyubum, and other collections of Tibetan Buddhist Literature He is directing the historical Tibetan Dictionary, which has built a powerful online platform for soliciting and publishing detailed historical studies of Tibetan words, including integrated citations of the usage of words in Tibetan literature. A new project which is not yet public involves the creation of sophisticated event management system for the documentation of Tibetan and Himalayan historical events.

    Select Publications

    • Germano, David F. (2000-present, director), The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (www.thlib.org). Within this international project, I am the director and/or facilitator of multiple major collaborative projects involving technology in GIS research, language instructional materials, dictionaries, literary archives, ethnographic research and historical work. This is the largest international initiative in Tibetan Studies involving digital technology, multiple disciplines, and multiple institutions. See there for major Web publications involving Tibetan literature, music, geography, and other subjects. It is also leading efforts at integrating academic work with community services initiatives in Tibet. I am the primary person responsible for the Library’s structural design, social networks, and intellectual program, as well as being active in one way or another in almost every major project therein.
    • David Germano (2007). “Re-membering the Dismembered Body of Tibet: Contemporary Tibetan Visionary Movements in the People’s Republic of China.” An abridged version published in Defining Buddhisms: A Reader edited by Karen Derris and Natalie Gummer in the series “Critical Categories in the Study of Religion,” edited by Russell T. McCutcheon for Equinox Publishing.
    • Germano, David F. (2007). “The shifting terrain of the tantric bodies of Buddhas and Buddhists from an Atiyoga perspective”. In The Pandita and the Siddha: Tibetan Studies in Honour of E. Gene Smith, ed. Ramon Prats. Amnye Machen Institute.
    • Germano, David and William S. Waldron (2006). "The Arising of Ālaya: History and Doctrine". In The Buddha’s Way: The Confluence of Buddhist Thought and Contemporary Psychology in the Post-Modern Age, editor D. K. Nauriyal, Routledge Curzon Press.
    • Germano, David F. (2005). "Atiyoga/Great Perfection". In Encyclopedia of Religions, Macmillan Reference USA.
    • Germano, David F. with Gregory Hillis (2005). "Tibetan Buddhist Meditation". In Encyclopedia of Religions, Macmillan Reference USA.
    • Germano, David F. with Gregory Hillis (2005). "Klong chen rab ‘byams pa". In Encyclopedia of Religions, Macmillan Reference USA.
    • Germano, David F. (2005). “The History of Funerary rDzogs chen”. In the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, vol. 1 , www.jiats.org.
    • Germano, David F. with Eveline Yang and others. "Tibetan Furniture Making: Traditions and Innovations" (2004): a documentary produced and exhibited at the "Wooden Wonders" exhibition, Pacific Asian Art Museum in Los Angeles, November 2004.
    • Germano, David F. and Kevin Trainor (co-editors, (2004). Embodying the Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia. SUNY. This volume of essays on Buddhist relic traditions across Asia is drawn from our four year seminar on the subject in the American Academy of Religions.
    • Germano, David F. (2004). "Relics of the Living Buddha in Tibet". In Embodying the Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia, editors David Germano and Kevin Trainor, SUNY.
    • Review, of Goldstein, Melvyn (2003), The New Tibetan-English Dictionary of Modern Tibetan, Berkeley: the University of California Press. In Geolinguistics, vol. 29.
    • Germano, David F. (2002). “The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library”. In the “In Brief” column of D-Lib Magazine (May 2002, www.d-lib.org). Republished in ACCESS (www.igroupnet.com).
    • Germano, David F., co-editor (2002). The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism. Brill Press.
    • Germano, David F. (2002) "The Seven Descents and the Nature of sNga' 'gyur: The “history” of rNying ma tantras". In The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism, Brill Press.
    • Germano, David F. with Nathaniel Garson (2001) “The Rise of “Thematic Research Collections” in the study, teaching and transmission of Buddhist scriptures”. Journal of Electronic Buddhist Texts, Volume 3, December 2001, pp. 147-190. Published by Electronic Buddhist Text Institute, Seoul, Korea.
    • Germano, David F. (2001) "Encountering Tibet: The Ethics, Soteriology and Creativity of Cross-cultural Interpretation". In the Journal of the American Academy of Religions.
    • Germano, David F. with Janet Gyatso (2000). “Longchenpa and the Posessions of Dakinıs”. Tantra in Practice, edited by David White, Princeton University Press.
    • Germano, David F. (1998). "Re-membering the dismembered body of Tibet: The contemporary Ter movement in the PRC". In Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity (editors Melvyn Goldstein and Matthew Kapstein); Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
    • Germano, David F. (1997). "Dying, death and other opportunities". In Religions of Tibet in Practice (editor Donald Lopez), pp. 458-493; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
    • Germano, David F. (1997). "Food, clothes, dreams and karmic propensities" In Religions of Tibet in Practice (editor Donald Lopez), pp. 293-312; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
    • Germano, David F. (1997) "Preliminary practices: craziness, the elements and the letter Hum". In Religions of Tibet in Practice (editor Donald Lopez), pp. 313-334; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
    • Germano, David F. (1994). "Architecture and Absence in the Secret Tantric History of rDzogs Chen". In The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 17.2, pp. 203-335.