Andrew Quintman is a scholar of Buddhism in Tibet and the Himalaya, and associate professor in the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University. He writes, teaches, and lectures about Buddhist literature and history, sacred geography and pilgrimage, and visual cultures of the Himalayan region. His work addresses the intersections of Buddhist literary production, circulation, and reception; the reciprocal influences of textual and visual narratives; and the formation of religious subjectivities and institutional identities. He is also engaged in developing new digital tools for the study and teaching of religion.
His book The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014) won the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies and the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University. It also received honorable mention for the 2016 E. Gene Smith book prize at the Association for Asian Studies. In 2010 his new English translation of the Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics and is currently in its tenth reprint.
He is currently working on two projects. The first, the monograph Buddhism on the Border, is a history of Drakar Taso (Brag dkar rta so) Monastery and more broadly explores Buddhist religious and literary culture in the borderlands of Tibet and Nepal. It demonstrates that a provincial region on the Himalayan margins was the site of significant religious innovation in the early modern period, and exercised a widespread and enduring influence on the traditions of what might be considered a “borderland Buddhism.” The second, a project on the Life of the Buddha, interrogates the role of Buddhist literature and art in the formation seventeenth-century monastic identity at the site of Takden Phuntsokling, seat of the Jonang tradition in western Tibet. This work includes a new multimodal digital platform for the synthetic analysis of texts and images.
Quintman completed his undergraduate studies at Hampshire College and his graduate work at the University of Michigan. He served for seven years as Academic Director of the School for International Training’s Tibetan Studies program based in Kathmandu. Between 2001-2007 he also designed and led a summer program for Tibetan Studies in Tibet offered through the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Wesleyan, he taught at Princeton University, where he held the Cotsen-Mellon Fellowship in the History of the Book in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and at Yale University.
Quintman currently serves as the President of the Board of Directors of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). He is former Co-Chair of the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion and co-leads an ongoing collaborative workshop on Religion and the Literary in Tibet. He helped establish the Yale Himalaya Initiative for which he served as Faculty Coordinator. From 2015–2017, he was a Collaborative Research Fellow in the ACLS-Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies. During 2018–2019, he is a Research Fellow in the ACLS-Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.
Andrew Quintman’s CV is available here.