Annabella Pitkin

Biography

Annabella Pitkin, Associate Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Lehigh University, is a scholar of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism. She writes and teaches about the intersections of intellectual history, art and material culture, literature, and sacred landscape, with a focus on Tibetan Buddhist theories of modernity, Buddhist ideals of renunciation, miracle narratives, and biography. Her research highlights how people use stories about the past as resources for agency and creativity in the present. Current projects explore questions about religion, creativity, political power, and technological change, with a focus on re-imagining human futures. She received her B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia. 

She is the author of the book Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a 20th Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which engages themes of relationship, continuity, loss, and memory in the life of the meditator-poet Khunu Lama Rinpoche Tenzin Gyaltsen (1895-1977), perhaps best known today as a teacher of the 14th Dalai Lama. Her article “All the Wealth of Poets: The Bodhicitta Verses of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen” in the Journal of Tibetan Literature (Spring 2024) further explores Khunu Rinpoche's poems about the altruistic Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva. 

Dr. Pitkin's articles on Tibetan and Himalayan theories of modernity, continuity, and secularism include “Dazzling Displays and Mysterious Departures: Bodhisattva Pedagogy as Performance in the Biographies of Two Twentieth Century Tibetan Buddhist Masters” in Religions (2017, 8(9)); and “The 'Age of Faith' and the 'Age of Knowledge': Secularism and Modern Tibetan Accounts of Yogic Power” in Himalaya: The Journal for the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies (2016, Vol. 36 (1). In the book chapter “Sustaining the Sacred Mountains: Tibetan Environmentalism and Sacred Landscape in a Time of Conflict" in Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions II: Intellectual History of Key Concepts, edited by Gregory Adam Scott and Stefania Travagnin (DeGruyter 2020), Dr. Pitkin explores Tibetan environmentalism and practices of sacred landscape as modes of cultural survival. 

Dr. Pitkin is currently at work on a new book on Buddhism, community-and-place making, and political theory.

Her teaching interests include survey courses on classical and contemporary East Asian religious literature, introductory and advanced courses on Buddhism and Buddhist societies, Tibetan Buddhism, life-story literature and art, gender in East Asia, global Buddhism and Buddhist modernities, religion and pop culture, and Buddhist social and ecological movements. She is part of the Lehigh research group the "Futurists Collective: The Humanities in the Age of AI and Other Emerging Technologies," and works with students to create resilient, authentic learning communities in this time of rapid technological change.

Dr. Pitkin's research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Blakemore-Freeman Foundation, the Fulbright Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship. She is on the Editorial Committee of the Treasury of Lives: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalaya. (http://treasuryoflives.org/) and the Rubin Institute.