Education & Professional History
Roger Jackson is John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies and Religion, Emeritus, at Carleton College, where he taught the religions of South Asia and Tibet for nearly three decades. He also has taught at the University of Michigan, Fairfield University, McGill University, and Maitripa College. He has a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under Geshe Lhundub Sopa. His scholarly interests include Indic and Tibetan Buddhist systems of philosophy, meditation, and ritual; Buddhist religious poetry; the study of mysticism; religion in Sri Lanka; and the contours of modern Buddhist thought. His books include Is Enlightenment Possible? Dharmakīrti and rGyal tshab rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No–Self and Liberation (1993), Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre (with José Cabezón, 1996), Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars (with John Makransky, 1999), Tantric Treasures: Three Collections of Mystical Verse from Buddhist India (2004), The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems (with Geshe Sopa et al., 2009), Mind Seeing Mind: Mahāmudrā and the Geluk Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (2019), which received the 2020 Toshihide Numata Award for the “outstanding book in any area of in Buddhist Studies,” and Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World (2022). He has written many articles, book chapters, and reviews, and presented regularly at national and international scholarly conferences. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies from 1985 to 1993, and co-edited the Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies from 2006 to 2018. His book, Saraha: Poet of Blissful Gnosis, will be published in Shambhala’s Lives of the Masters series in 2024. His current project focuses on the place of Buddhism in the Beat literary and spiritual movement in mid-20th-century North America.
