Janet Gyatso

Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies, concentrating on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton, 1998); In the Mirror of Memory  (SUNY, 1992);  Women of Tibet: Past and Present (Columbia, 2006) and Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia, 2015). The latter focuses on alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan medicine in the 16th–18th centuries. She has also written on sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination movement in Buddhism. Previous scholarship has focused on visionary revelation in Buddhism; lineage, memory, and authorship; the philosophy of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Her current book project is on animal ethics, using posthuman and Buddhist perspectives. Gyatso served as co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion and president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies. She teaches lecture courses and advanced seminars on Buddhist history, ritual, and ideas, and on Tibetan literary practices and religious history. In both teaching and writing she draws on cultural and literary theory, and endeavors to widen the spectrum of intellectual resources for the understanding of Buddhist and Tibetan history. She is a member of the FAS Committee on the Study of Religion, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, in addition to her main appointment in the Divinity School.  She co-chairs the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum. Gyatso taught at Amherst College before coming to Harvard as the Divinity School's first Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies. Gyatso earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. 

Her essay, "Clouds Over Mountains, Streams Under Ice: The Messenger Reaches Tibet,” co-authored with Lama Jabb, was published In Yigal Bronner and David Shulman, eds., Mapping the World: Courier Poetry from South Asia and Beyond, Routledge Press, 202​6.

She organized the panel "Tibetan Interdependence, or Dendrel, as a Way of Freedom” and gave a paper for it at the American Academy of Religion meeting held in November 2025 in Boston.

She delivered a plenary address at the conference "Cultural and Historical Significance of His Holiness Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso -- An Exploration" held in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, India in December 2025.