Team Updates

Research Associate Dr. Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is a Lhopo knowledge keeper and scholar of the cultures, religions, literatures, and histories of Sikkim, India, in the eastern Himalayas, and connections between Sikkim, Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal. His publications and research focus on human and more-than-human relationships in the valleys and mountains of Sikkim, connected to ritual, land, food, and climate change. His research interests include book provenance, Indigenous knowledge, cultural reclamation, and repatriation. Part of his work as a lead researcher for the Himalayas project area, Bhutia researches the texts and provenance histories of Tibetan language manuscripts and printed books in the MacDonald Collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto, and connects these books to Himalayan communities locally and globally. Bhutia has led traditional knowledge workshops in Sikkim and in North America, focused on sharing traditional ink-making and prayer flag printing techniques. Sharing this knowledge within Tibetan and Himalayan communities in the Himalayas and the global diaspora is essential for restoring environmental sustainability for these Tibetan spiritual and artistic practices and will have an important impact.

Hidden Stories team member Za Thinley Gyatso is a PhD candidate in the Study of Religion, with a Doctoral Collaborative Specialization in Environmental Studies at the School of the Environment, University of Toronto. He joins the Hidden Stories team as a Doctoral Fellow, continuing his research on Buddhist ecocritical literature in medieval Tibet, work which sits between Buddhist Studies and Environmental Studies. Along with his doctoral research, Gyatso has been instrumental in the descriptive inventorying of over 1,500 Tibetan texts in the Lobsang P. Lhalungpa Collection at the University of Toronto’s East Asian Library, work which will be transformative for the field of Buddhist Studies.

North American Collections - Toronto
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, holds a collection of 70 manuscripts and 101 woodblock-printed books in the MacDonald Collection. These are primarily Tibetan texts, with some books from Sikkim and Nepal. The Hidden Stories project works on provenance research on books in the MacDonald Collection, research on sewn bookbindings, as well as the study of ritual use of books in the collection.

This work is led by Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia (Hidden Stories), with research support by Thinley Gyatso (PhD Candidate in Buddhist Studies, U of T), James Canary (Lilly Library, Indiana U), and Tim Perry (U of T Libraries).