Thupten Kelsang

The Courtauld works to advance how we see and understand the visual arts, as an internationally renowned centre for the teaching, research of art history and a major public gallery. The Buddhism Public Scholar will be situated within The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Art and Conservation at The Courtauld. They will support collaborations with public institutions such as museums and libraries, as well as Buddhist temples and religious communities both in the UK and in Asia, to create public programming and produce knowledge about Buddhist Heritage.

Thupten Kelsang is a museum anthropologist with a Clarendon-funded DPhil from the University of Oxford. Specialising in community-engaged research and Tibetan museum collections, he has been consulted by the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the British Library, and the Horniman Museum. He is currently an AHRC Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, leading the 'Reanimating Tibetan Heritage' project.

This dissertation focuses on creating a sustainable and equitable relationship between the transnational Tibetan diaspora and museums with Tibetan collections. It would enable displaced Tibetans to access and re-engage with their displaced material heritage in museums (which are entangled in British and Chinese colonialism) and work towards countering the historic and acute absence of Tibetan voices in museums. Through online workshops and focus group discussions, this project will create a space for Tibetans to explore how they perceive historic Tibetan objects and their current lives as museum objects. Grounded in community-based participatory research (CBPR), this praxis-based research explores the potential future(s) of Tibetan collections in museums in the UK and their latent affordances for the wider Tibetan community. Through collaborative enquiry and co-production of knowledge, this project asks how Tibetan collections could be reimagined and reactivated.