The CCBS Staff
Director
Trine Brox
PhD, Associate Professor
DENMARK
Email: trinebrox @ hum.ku.dk
Trine Brox is Associate Professor in Modern Tibetan Studies and the Director of Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Brox has published several articles about contemporaneous issues in Tibet and the Tibetan exile: Topics span from Buddhism and economy, contesting secularisms, translations of democracy and conceptual history, over expedition and research history, to aesthetics and ethnicity at the market place. She has also co-edited the books Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard, and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption (2022) and Buddhism and Business: Merit, Material Wealth and Morality in the Global Market Economy (2020) with Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg, as well as On the Fringes of the Harmonious Society: Tibetans and Uyghurs in Socialist China (2014) with Ildikó Bellér-Hann. Brox is the PI of the international, collaborative research projects WASTE: Consumption and Buddhism in the Age of Garbage, that is funded by the Velux Fonden (2021-2025) and Buddhism, Business and Believers, which has been funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities (2016-2021) and the Carlsberg Foundation (2015-2017).
Beata Świtek
Assistant Professor
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixens Plads 8, office 10.4.51
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
DENMARK
Email: Beata.Switek @ hum.ku.dk
Beata Świtek is an anthropologist with an interest in everyday ethics and ethical transformations. In her most recent research on Buddhism and economy in Japan, she has been exploring the interplay between the ethical constitution of individuals and society-wide transformations.
Beyond Buddhism, Beata is also interested in the work of ethics in such contexts as intimacy and the body, care and care work, adventure sports, human interactions with the natural environment, broadly conceived sustainability, consumption, and life in cities. Alongside her long-standing engagement with Japan, Beata has also conducted research in Indonesia and in Europe (primarily the UK).
Outside of a strictly academic context, throughout the years, Beata has also applied her professional training in working for the benefit of charitable organisations, non-tertiary educational institutions, and other interest groups. In this role she has acted as a research team leader, educator, and an ethnographic film-maker.
DENMARK
Email: jb @ cas.au.dk
Jørn Borup is a scholar of religion specializing in Buddhism. He earned his Ph.D. with a project on contemporary Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhism (published by Brill in a revised version), and has since then done research on Zen/spirituality, and Pure Land/secularization. Buddhism in the West has been another major focus with projects on transnational/diaspora Buddhism (Japanese Americans in Hawaii and Vietnamese in Denmark) and he has conducted 10 years of mapping Buddhism in Denmark. He has participated in cooperative research projects on modern Buddhism, religious diversity, and the circulations of religious ideas and practices between East and West (’Eastspirit’).
He is mainly interested in contemporary religion using sociological and anthropological methods, but as a trained historian of religion he is also including textual studies and historical perspectives. He has published both scholarly books and articles as well as text books for high school levels and popular articles for non-specialists, most of which with a focus on religion, Buddhism and Asia. He is based in Denmark as an associate professor at the Dept. of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, but takes any opportunity to go to Japan (and Asia) for fieldwork.
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixens Plads 8, office 10-2-12
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
DENMARK
Email: yasmin.cho @ hum.ku.dk
Yasmin Cho is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has worked on materiality, mobility, and gender with a special focus on Tibetan Buddhist nuns in monastic encampments in China (Yachen Gar). Her publications have looked at the lives of Tibetan nuns from the perspectives of their material and mundane engagements in the Tibetan Buddhist revival in post-Mao Tibet. Her current project at the CCBS, “Wired: the role of infrastructure in the Tibetan Buddhist revival in contemporary China,” examines the infrastructural (dis)connections in Sino-Tibetan Buddhist relationships. After earning her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, she had postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan and Columbia University.
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixens Plads 8, office 10-2-12
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
DENMARK
Email: s.abrahms.k @ hum.ku.dk
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko joined the CCBS in June 2020, having received the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship in Horizon 2020 – Research and Innovation Framework Programme, European Commission. Abrahms-Kavunenko is an anthropologist and the author of Enlightenment and the Gasping City. She has published on the topics of Buddhism, shamanism, postsocialism, economic anthropology, plastics, global warming and pollution, and materiality in Mongolia and India. Dr Abrahms-Kavunenko has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology, New York University Shanghai, the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh. During her fellowship at the CCBS, Abrahms-Kavunenko will work on the project RESIDUE: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Blessings.
Sierra HumbertPh.D-fellow
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixens Plads 8, office 10.3.7
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
DENMARK
Email: sierra.humbert @ hum.ku.dk
Sierra Humbert is a Ph.D-student at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her Ph.D-project centres on the experiences, attitudes and influences that inform consumption practices and sanitary waste for female pilgrims to Vajrayogini temple, a significant pilgrimage site for Hindus and Buddhists in Sankhu, Nepal. During her PhD, she will produce an ethnographic account of women’s experiences of menstrual hygiene management (MHM) in Sankhu, focusing on the relationship between Newar Buddhist ritual practices, sacred spaces and sanitary waste imaginaries and practices.
Sierra graduated from her Bachelor’s in Human, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 2018, specialising in Social Anthropology. In 2020, she completed an MRes in Anthropology at University College London where her research project focused on Plum Village, an international Mahayana Buddhist tradition founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.
Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg
Founder
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixens Plads 8
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
DENMARK
Email: elizabeth.oerberg @ hum.ku.dk
Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is part of a collaborative research project on “Buddhism, Business and Believers” with a particular focus on spiritual tourism and the branding of Buddhism in Ladakh, India.
She has a PhD in Anthropology from Aarhus University where, as part of a larger research project on ‘Buddhism and Modernity’, she wrote her PhD thesis “Young Buddhism: Examining Ladakhi Buddhist Youth Engagements with Migration, Modernity and Morality in India”, highlighting the particularly prominent role that youth play in forwarding contemporary transformations of Buddhism.
Jane Caple
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixens Plads 8, office 11B-2-09
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
DENMARK
Email: gsb163 @ hum.ku.dk
Jane Caple has worked as a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and is now affiliated to the CCBS. With research interests in religion, economy, and morality, her current project explores the relationship between Buddhism and ideas about wealth, virtue, and social justice in Tibet. Her first monograph, forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i Press examines the moral dimensions of the revival and development of TIbetan monastic Buddhism in post-Mao China. She has also published articles and book chapters on monastic business development, Sino-Tibetan patronage and the ethics of collective donation.
After earning her PhD in Modern Languages and Cultures (Chinese Studies) from the University of Leeds in 2011, she was subsequently awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Manchester (2012-2015), where she also worked as a Lecturer. Her research draws on extended fieldwork in monasteries and communities in northeast Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai).
Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies 