About

Jue Liang is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a BA and MA from Renmin University of China (2009, 2011), an MA from the University of Chicago (2013), and a PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (2020). Her research and teaching engage with questions about continuities as well as innovations in the gender discourses of Buddhist communities. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation in general, and translating Tibetan literature in particular.

Jue’s first book, entitled Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel, uses new literary sources previously unexamined and contributes critical new data to current scholarship on women and gender in Tibetan Buddhism. It presents new insight into the formation of Yeshe Tsogyel’s literary tradition and suggests new ways of understanding gender in Buddhist traditions that can be broadly applicable to other fields.

Jue is currently working on two new projects. The first is titled “Souls on the Road: Pilgrimages to Tibet in the Chinese Religious Revival.” It centers around expressions of religiosity found on the two major roads connecting Sichuan Province and Tibet Autonomous Region in China in the 1990s and 2000s. This book will be the first to treat traveling as a mode of spirituality in contemporary China and road as the site of its expression. The other, “A New Treasury of Dharma: Modern Style Libraries in Tibetan Buddhism”, is a study of libraries in contemporary Tibetan Buddhist communities worldwide.