DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Dhondup T. Rekjong is a Tibetan scholar with broad expertise in Tibetan Buddhism as well as South and East Asian religious traditions. His research focuses on Buddhism in the context of colonial/post-colonial studies, religion and state power, and Indigenous cultural knowledge.

Rekjong received his M.A. from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, and he is the recipient of an ACLS/ Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a Buffett Global Impacts Graduate Fellowship, a Dalai Lama Graduate Scholarship, and a Khyentse Foundation grant.

His current book project is based upon his dissertation, Courage and Creativity under Chinese Rule: The Untold Story of Tibetan Cultural and Religious Survival in the 1980s, which examines how a generation of Tibetan monastic and lay scholars employed “skillful means,” or creative and adaptive strategies, in order to negotiate with and intervene in state power over issues of Tibetan language, history and religion. His second book project, Religious Empire: Reimagining Tibetan Buddhism in South Asia and Its Global Expansion, examines how Tibetan Buddhism was revived in South Asia in the early 1960s and how that unique revival laid the foundation for Tibetan Buddhism’s global expansion in the decades that followed.

His pedagogy focuses on helping students to think about religious traditions critically and comparatively; a strong believer in interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production, he is particularly excited about the impact that religious studies can have on students training for professions in medicine, law, technology or business. His current courses examine Buddhism’s relation to colonialism, contemporary science, cinema and ecology.

He is currently a producer of an upcoming documentary called Frontiers of the Mind: The 100-Year Project, and his short documentary, Tibet, Where the Wind Prays, was officially selected for the 2026 Tibet Film Festival and will be screened in Zürich, London, New York, and Washington, D.C. He is also in post-production on another short documentary, titled Faith Outside of Tibet.

Selected Publications:

Rekjong, Dhondup T. & Wallace, Darcie Price. “Contemporary Tibetan Music: blazing the path of religious, cultural, and political devotion.” The Journal of Culture and Religion, 2025.

Rekjong, Dhondup T. “The Forgotten History of the Dalai Lama’s Autobiography: Secular, Oral and Transnational Stories.” The Journal of Contemporary Buddhism, 2025.

——. “Searching for the Body: A Contemporary Perspective on Tibetan Buddhist Tantra by Rae Erin Dachille.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 2024.

——. “Centering Native Languages in Western Scholarship.” The Journal of Critical Asian Studies, 2024.

——. “Pema Tseden.” The Treasure of Lives: a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region, 2023.

——. “How Buddhism Met Science: A Monastic Scholar’s Journey.” Lion’s Roar. December 21, 2023. https://www.lionsroar.com/monastic-scholars-journey/

——. “The Rainbow Path of Many Hues” by Pema Bhum: Book Review in High Peaks Pure Earth, July 05, 2023. https://highpeakspureearth.com/the-rainbow-path-of-many-hues-by-pema-bhum-book-review-by-dhondup-t-rekjong/