Gray Tuttle

Professor Tuttle, in his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2005), examines the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. He discusses the critical role of pan-Asian Buddhism in Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory).

His current research project, for a book tentatively entitled “Amdo (Qinghai/Gansu): Middle Ground between Lhasaand Beijing,” focuses on Tibetan Buddhist institutional growth from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and how economic growth in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands fueled expansion and renewal of these institutions into the contemporary period. He also co-edited Sources of Tibetan Tradition for the series Introduction to Asian Civilizations and The Tibetan History Reader (both with Columbia University Press).

Professor Tuttle teaches courses on modern Tibetan history, the history of Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist relations, nationalist historiography in East Asia, and Tibetan civilization.

He received his AB from Princeton, his MA in regional studies (East Asian), and his PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic studies from Harvard. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2005.