Michael Sheehy

Biography

Michael Sheehy is Research Assistant Professor in Religious Studies, Director of Scholarship at the Contemplative Sciences Center, and affiliated faculty with the Tibet Center at the University of Virginia. Michael has conducted extensive field research and text preservation work with monastic communities inside Tibet, including three years training in a Buddhist monastery in the Golok cultural domain of far eastern Tibet. His writings and translations give attention to literary and intellectual histories of marginalized traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. His current research interests are in the contributions of Buddhism and Tibetan contemplative traditions to discourses in the humanities, cognitive science, and cultural psychology. At the Contemplative Sciences Center, Michael leads an interdisciplinary collaborative to develop an international digital portal that publishes practices and pedagogical resources, encyclopedic essays on historical and contemporary contemplative traditions, and research in the contemplative humanities and sciences. With David Germano, he is the Series Editor of both the Contemplative Sciences and Traditions and Transformations in Tibetan Buddhism book series published by the University of Virginia Press. He is co-editor with Klaus-Dieter Mathes of The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet (SUNY 2019).