GRADUATE RESEARCH COLLOQUIA

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:00:02 +0000

GRADUATE RESEARCH COLLOQUIA Elizabeth Williams Mon, 04/06/2026 - 16:00

SPRING 2026 GRADUATE RESEARCH COLLOQUIA

MONDAY, APRIL 13, 10:00 - 11:00 AM
HUMN 230
Eaton Humanities, 1610 Pleasant St.

PRESENTERS

Genevieve Hauer, M.A. Candidate, Religious Studies

Cementing Celestial Sovereignty: Hagiographic and Photographic Depictions of the Empress Dowager Cixi

While largely remembered in history as a despot who refused to modernize China and led to its downfall, Empress Dowager Cixi’s Buddhist devotion and promulgation is rarely highlighted. How did Empress Cixi’s identity as a Manchu woman in power, in relation to her self-portrayal as a Buddhist goddess, influence her promotion of Buddhism amidst a turbulent political climate?

Through examining the hagiographic account of Princess Der Ling’s time spent with the Empress Dowager, as well as photographic and portrait representations of the Empress Dowager in contrast with historic perceptions of Cixi as a cruel, tyrannical leader through a gendered lens, we gain insight into how Cixi harnessed her religion to exert power both nationally and globally.

Ana Silveria Nedochetko, M.A. Candidate, Religious Studies

Epistemic Figures at the Liminality: The Dakini as a Mode of Knowing

This presentation uses the Tibetan Buddhist text I am currently translating as a point of entry for examining dakini epistemology as a mode of knowing that challenges dominant assumptions about authority, embodiment, and knowledge production. Rather than focusing on textual analysis per se, I explore how dakini figures articulate alternative epistemic frameworks that complicate academic distinctions between symbol, practice, and lived experience.

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Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage April 10th

Elizabeth Williams — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:35:40 +0000

Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage April 10th Elizabeth Williams Wed, 03/18/2026 - 12:35

Join us for a lecture by Catherine Hartmann, University of Wyoming on the topic of her new book:

Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Buddhism

4pm on Friday, April 10th
E250 in the CASE Building, ��ñ��

How can a person learn to see a mountain as a divine mandala, especially when, to the ordinary eye, the mountain looks like a pile of rocks and snow? This is the central challenge of Tibetan pilgrimage — and a window into one of the most pressing questions in the study of religion: how do religious traditions create and sustain belief in ordinarily invisible beings and landscapes? Drawing on Tibetan pilgrimage literature spanning the 13th to 20th centuries, including foundational narratives of holy places, polemical debates about the value of pilgrimage, written guides to holy sites, advice texts, and personal diaries, this talk explores how the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition challenges pilgrims to see beyond ordinary perception. It argues that the pilgrimage tradition does not simply assume that pilgrims experience this sacred landscape as real, but instead leads pilgrims to adopt deliberate practices of seeing: ways of looking at and interacting with the world that shape their experience of the holy mountain.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies with support from the Tibet Himalaya Initiative.

Catherine Hartmann is an assistant professor of Religious Studies and a scholar of the history of Buddhism at the University of Wyoming. Her research engages how religion shapes our experience of the world, and in the practices religions develop to transform that experience. Dr. Hartmann's primary research project is about intellectual history of pilgrimage in Tibet, but she is also interested in Buddhist ethics, as well as Buddhist approaches to addiction and recovery.

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GRADUATE RESEARCH COLLOQUIA

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Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage April 10th

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