We're delighted to welcome Dr Hannibal Taubes to the department! Dr Taubes is trained in Chinese cultural history, Tibetology, and a Buddhology, and his work triangulates between religious studies, art history, and social history. Beyond elite categories like “Buddhism,” “Daoism,” or “Confucianism,” he is centrally interested in using images, epigraphy, and local historical accounts to reconstruct the popular religious worlds of the early-modern Sino-Tibetan and Sino-Mongol frontiers.

His first book project, based on his dissertation, examines now-forgotten traditions of mural-painting in northern Chinese temples between roughly 900 to 1900 CE, tracing the “power of images” through encounters with painters, village communities, elite epigraphers, ritualists, poets, novelists, Chinese and foreign travelers, and modernist thinkers and policy-makers.

He also has a variety of published and planned research projects examining Buddhist narrative forms, comparative religions of India and China, early-modern and modern Tibetan history, contemporary policy towards ethnic and religious minorities in the PRC, diasporic Chinese religions in North America, etc.