Tsering Shakya is Associate Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia at the Institute for Asian Research, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He is co-lead of the Himalaya Program.

Tsering is a widely published scholar on Tibet. His research explores the confluence of politics, ethno-national identity and religious practice in cultural production and social transformation across both historical and contemporary Tibet and the Himalayas. He is also interested in contemporary minority policy and social media in the PRC. He currently serves as the President of the International Association of Tibetan Studies.

His most expansive work to date The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (Columbia University Press, NY 1999), the first comprehensive account of Tibet’s recent history, was acclaimed as “the definitive history of modern Tibet” by The New York Times. Other published works include Fire Under the Snow, The Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner (Harvill Press, 1997), which has translated into more than 20 languages. He was also co-editor of the first anthology of modern Tibetan short stories and poems, Song of the Snow Lion, New Writings from Tibet (University of Hawaii, 2000). Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936-1947 (Serindia Publications, London, 2003), coedited with Dr Clare Harris. The Struggle for Tibet (Verso, London, 2009), a conversation with Chinese dissident scholar Wang Lixiong, was a landmark publication that articulated both the Tibet problem and China’s internal debates.