Trine Brox

CV

Formal Education

2009  PhD, University of Copenhagen. The PhD thesis The Enchanted Gift of Democracy: Imagining and Negotiating Democracy in the Tibetan Diaspora (Brx 2008) inquires into how Tibetans living in India imagine, organise and negotiate governance that is modern and democratic, but also essentially Tibetan.

2003  MA Tibetan studies, University of Copenhagen. In my MA dissertation, Tibetansk kulturdiskurs ["Tibetan Discourse on Culture"], I analyse Tibetan-language discourses about "culture" from 1979 to 2002. I trace the range of words used for culture, the frequency and contexts of their uses, and I consider the relationship between the modulations of discourses and contemporaneous political developments. Exams on MA-level include minority studies, Tibetan society and language (classical/modern).

1998  BA Tibetan studies, University of Copenhagen (enrolled 1994). Exams include Tibetan language, history, art, society, philosophy, and one year of anthropology.

1996  Cand. Mag. social science, University of Tromsø (enrolled 1991). Exams include philosophy, sociology, social anthropology and Tibetan studies.

Primary fields of research

All my research is language-based and reflects my cross-faculty educational background in the social sciences and the humanities. I have conducted fieldwork amongst Tibetans living in Tibet, China, India and Nepal. Current research projects are:

(1) Buddhism, Business and Believers. The project enquires into contemporary relations between economy and Buddhism. The aim is to gain novel insights into the manner that Buddhism becomes an agent mediating distinctions between virtue and value, spirituality and materiality, gifts and commodities – and therefore also subscribes meaning to objects, actions and human relations. The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities (Feb. 2016 - Aug. 2020) funds this international, collaborative and interdisciplinary research project. Additionally, the Carlsberg Foundation has granted funding towards a post.doc. position that is organised under the BBB-umbrella and two years of expenses (Sept. 2015 - Feb. 2018). The project brings together scholars from various fields, such as language-based area studies, religious studies, anthropology and economics, in order to ensure disciplinary diversity and expertise covering a range of Buddhist traditions and geographies. The project has also enabled the establishment of Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies – located in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies. You can find us here:
Website http://ccrs. ku.dk/research/projects/buddhism-business-and-believers/
Blog  https://centerforcontemporarybuddhiststudies.wordpress.com/
Facebook   https://www.facebook.com/groups/853592954759490/
Twitter  @ CCBS_studies

(2) Displaced Knowledge: Prince Peter and the Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia. Collaborative research project with Dr. Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen, the National Museum of Denmark. Research in the Danish archives since July 2014 and in Kalimpong March 2015. The focus of this project is Prince Peter’s ethnographic knowledge production during the seven years he spent in the north-east Indian Himalayan town of Kalimpong during 1950-1957. Here, he was part of and later leader of the Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia. The aim of the project is to trace the biographies of Prince Peter and his Tibetan collaborators as well as the biographies of the Tibetan artefacts, accounts and anthropometry he collected in order to advance our understanding about displacement of people and knowledge. Our project about Displaced Knowledge is part of the research community Object Lessons from Tibet & the Himalayas.

Object Lessons from Tibet & the Himalayas: I am one of four founders and leaders of the research network Object Lessons from Tibet & the Himalayas that aims at a comparative investigation into the roles of visual and material culture in the co-production, loss and recovery of colonial knowledge. Together with Dr Emma Martin (Lecturer in Museology, University of Manchester, UK) Dr Diana Lange (Research Associate in Central Asian Seminar, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany), and my partner in research Dr. Miriam Zeitzen Kogtvedgaard (curator, National Museum of Denmark) we have a blog and arrange various academic activities, including collaborative research towards developing a Tibetan museology.
Find our blog here: https://objectlessonsfromtibetblog.wordpress.com/

(3) Democracy the ‘Tibetan Way’, research conducted in Tibetan communities in India since 2005. This is a study of democracy and democratisation among Tibetan exiles living in India since 1959. The project’s point of departure is that democracy is a constructed concept and the project thus questions democracy as a predefined and universally applicable concept. Instead it aims to show how democracy cannot move in time and space without translation, and looks at how democracy is translated by Tibetans in India and how their translations – contained within the framework of the Tibetans’ freedom struggle – manifest in institutions, procedures, political cultures and discourses. I have published 13 articles based upon this research, as well as one monograph (400 pages) published in May 2016: Tibetan Democracy: Governance, Leadership and Conflict in Exile. London: I.B.Tauris.

Teaching

Tibet

Tibetans in exile

Tibetan Buddhism

Buddhism and economy

Cultural translation

Minorities in China

Democracy in Asia

List of BA content courses and master classes that I have taught 

• Tibetan Buddhism: Translations and transformations

• MA-research LAB

• Academic Writing and Argumentation

• Theory and Method in the Humanities

• CCRS Common Course – Science and Theory of Science, Tibetology and China Studies

• Interdisciplinary Issues in Asian Studies: Project Design

• Cultural Translation

• Buddhism in the modern world

• Money, Monks and Buddhist Marketplaces in Asia

• Democracy in Asia?

• Democracy and China

• The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912): Greatness and Fall

• State Policies and Local Responses in China's West

• Chinese Borderlands

• Exile: Tibet Imagined and Organized Abroad

• Tibetan Culture: Concept, Politics and Performance

• Tibet and the politics of religion

• The Tibet Issue

• Tibetan Biographies

• Introduction to Tibetology

• Introduction to China Studies: Reading sources

List of Language Courses (BA-level)

• Fluent Tibetan

• Modern Literary Tibetan: Translation and Intensive Grammatical Analysis

• Reincarnation and Retirement: Tibetan Language Documents and Conversations about the Dalai Lama

• Tibetan Discourses: Global Issues for Tibetan People

• Transcribing Tibetan

Short presentation

Professional social media presence

Blog CCBS                   https://centerforcontemporarybuddhiststudies.wordpress.com/

Blog Object Lessons     https://objectlessonsfromtibetblog.wordpress.com/

Academia.edu              http://ku-dk.academia.edu/TrineBrox

ResearchGate               https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Trine_Brox

LinkedIn                      https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinebrox/

Twitter                         @BroxTrine