Dharamshala Archives

Kyle Hornick

Mr. Kyle Hornick’s interest in India and Buddhist philosophy began when he spent four months studying abroad in Varanasi, India, in the fall of 2019. After leaving, he returned to his home institution, the University of Denver where he finished his final semester and received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

In addition to his interest in math, he also explored his artistic nature, taking courses in visual arts whenever possible. His artistic coursework culminated in independent study in graphic novels under the supervision of painter Jeffrey Keith. After his graduation, he chose to further his studies in art and received two years of formal training through the Watts Atelier of the Arts, a school based in Encinitas, California focused on teaching fundamental art skills and traditional painting. Since then, Mr. Hornick has worked on a series of self-directed graphic novel projects, which involved independent research into chosen subject matter, writing, illustrating, and digitally formatting stories like “Shrubby, Self,” and “A Trick of the Light.” Occasionally he finds work in the field of engineering as a technical illustrator where he brings to life the designs of various companies. Besides art, he is interested in the study of language (French and Hindi), world travel, dance, and trekking.

Mr. Hornick is conducting his Fulbright-Nehru project in Dharamshala, India, where he is illustrating the story of Indian and Tibetan preservation efforts of thangka painting with a graphic novel. He hopes to emphasize the Center for Living Buddhist Art’s origin story and will place this narrative in the context of India and Tibet’s shared Buddhist history. His pages in progress will be on display at the Hope Café gallery in Dharamshala and the project will culminate in a final exhibition and panel discussion that will be organized with the help of the Central University of Himachal Pradesh.

Erin Burke

Erin Burke is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Erin holds a BS/BA in anthropology and religious studies from the College of Charleston as well as an MA in religious studies from the University of Virginia. Her interests include the intersection of universal and indigenous religious traditions, definitions of secular and religious, and the role of imagination in religious practice and literature. She has been studying Tibetan language in Tibet, Nepal, and the United States for over 15 years. She has also conducted research in Tibet and Nepal on Tibetan literature and practice and is in the process of producing translations of religious and creative Tibetan stories.

In her Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Erin is exploring the perspectives on the production and interpretation of Tibetan fiction by discussing late 20th-century and contemporary Tibetan short stories with Tibetan writers, publishers, and librarians. Her project is delving into how Tibetan short stories contribute to the modern Tibetan religious imagination. By identifying continuities with literary Buddhist and oral vernacular expressions, this project is shedding light on popular modes of religious thought that have been marginalized in the scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism. Erin is also studying how Tibetan literary narratives written by lay people foreground multivocal religious world views that do not often appear in normative Buddhist texts. In her discussions with Tibetan authors and intellectuals in Dharamshala, India, she is also investigating the ways in which the first popularly accessible literature in Tibetan history contributes to the ongoing development of Tibetan Buddhism.

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Christopher Gadomski

Christopher Gadomski graduated with a major in neuroscience and behavioral biology and a minor in religion from Emory University where he studied the epigenetic underpinnings of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. During his time there, he volunteered as an advanced emergency medical technician and also served as the technical director for Emory’s internet Radio Station, WMRE. Since graduation, he has been researching in the area of neuroimmunology of brain metastases using computational and in vitro techniques. He plans to pursue a career in medicine and increase healthcare accessibility for the marginalized communities.

For more than 60 years, the Tibetan people have lived in exile to escape forced secularization and preserve their way of life. And they have succeeded despite immense hardship, as illustrated by the fact that their unique culture and religious practices now thrive in Dharamshala and around the world. What underlies this resilience against persecution and displacement? Chris’s Fulbright-Nehru project is helping to document, preserve, and promote the oral histories of the Tibetan exile community. This documentation of life in exile – past, present, and future – may provide an insight into how to cultivate resilience in other refugee communities and instill the values of compassion and well-being in the face of hardship.

Briana Brightly

Briana Brightly is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research centers on the intersection of religion, art, and science in South Asia. Briana’s dissertation, “The Buddhist Craftsman: Making Images during the Golden Age of Tibetan Medicine, 1600–1800”, investigates how physicians and artists used the tools and techniques of Buddhist image-making to advance medical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In probing the production of images, rather than their consumption, Briana hopes to open up new possibilities for how scholars imagine the “sacred” in relation to the “scientific” within the context of visual culture.

Briana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the creation of anatomical illustrations in 17th-century Tibet. In order to visualize the human body, Tibetan artists not only observed dissected corpses but also followed a highly codified system of measurement which formed the basis of religious paintings during this period. How did they reconcile these two points of view? And what can their creative process tell us about the relationship between religion, art, and medicine in early-modern Tibet? These are some of the questions that Briana is addressing at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astrological Institute in Dharamshala, her primary site of research.