Project Initiator: Berthe Jansen
Berthe Jansen is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University, with a PhD in Buddhist Studies. Her monograph The Monastery Rules: Tibetan Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet came out in 2018 with University of California Press. Jansen is the PI of the Van Manen project. Within the project, she studies the collection’s ephemera. Many of her articles can be read or downloaded here.
Post-doc: Nils Martin
Nils Martin is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University and is associated with the CRCAO in Paris. He has worked extensively on the Buddhist art history and epigraphy of Ladakh, from the Tibetan imperial period up to the Namgyal dynasty. His PhD thesis, which won the Khyentse Foundation award for best dissertation, discusses the painted monuments of the Wanla Group (c. 14th century). Martin is currently preparing a study on some of the earliest Buddhist rock-carvings and Tibetan inscriptions in Ladakh and Baltistan (c. 8th-11th centuries). In the context of the Van Manen Project, Martin will conduct research on the material culture collected by Johan Van Manen, housed at the Worldmuseum Leiden.
Post-doc: Tenzin Tsepak
Tenzin Tsepak is a scholar in the field of Tibetan studies. He completed his PhD at Indiana University’s Central Eurasian Studies Department, with a dissertation that focuses on the transmission of Indic poetics into Tibetan literary discourse to reimagine early modernity in Tibet. Before joining Leiden University, he was a teaching assistant professor of Tibetan and Himalayan studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research centers on Tibetan history writing, language pedagogy, and Tibetan literature with a particular focus on poetics. As a member of the Van Manen Project, Tsepak is tasked with researching the early 20th-century Tibetan language autobiographies housed in the Leiden University Library and the Worldmuseum Leiden.
PhD candidate: Samten Yeshi
Samten brings a colorful palette of working experience to the project. He started his career as a bilingual journalist for Bhutan’s national newspaper. He worked on a cultural documentation project with the Shejun Agency for Cultural Documentation and Research (which was later merged with the Loden Foundation), served as a curator for the collections of the Wangduecholing Palace, and has experience running his family’s foundation “Druk Nyo Fundation.” In this project Samten will explore the Tibetan Buddhist Rituals of Deceiving Death as it is depicted in the (textual) materials of the Van Manen collection.
Affiliated members
Associated researcher: Edward Garrett
Edward Garrett is Principal Investigator of the project “Rongring Right Now: Digital Resources for the Lepcha Language“, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom and based at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. With a background in both Tibetan linguistics and software development for language documentation and analysis, he is collaborating with the Van Manen Project by enriching and expanding access to the Lepcha manuscripts that were collected by Van Manen.
Project manager: Birte Kristiansen
Birte Kristiansen has an MA in Middle Eastern Studies and has worked for many years as a librarian and project manager at Leiden University.
Software engineer: Chris Handy
Christopher Handy is a software engineer at the Information Management and Facilities department at Leiden University. He has a PhD in Religious Studies from McMaster University (2016). His research focuses on three areas: Buddhist monastic law, historical politeness and computational linguistics. His primary role in the Van Manen Project is to create and maintain custom databases, web apps and other software used by the project. Many of his digital projects can be found on his GitHub site: https://github.com/handyc
Student Assistant: Anna Ladina Huggenberg
Anna is a MA student of linguistics, focusing on language documentation and Tibetic languages. She is currently working on the translation of Bhutia manuscripts of the early 20th century. In the Van Manen Project, she is assisting in the digitalization and cataloguing of the collection’s manuscripts.
