Dr. Jörg Heimbel

Jörg Heimbel studied Tibetology and Social Anthropology at the University of Göttingen and the University of Hamburg, where he received his Magister Artium in 2007 with a thesis on the life and works of the Fifth gDong thog sPrul sku bsTan pa’i rgyal mtshan (1933–2015). He received his PhD in Tibetology from the same university in 2014 with as doctoral thesis on the life and times of Ngor chen Kun dga’ bzang po (1382–1456), a revised version of which he published in 2017. During his doctoral research, he joined the Tibetan Language Program at Tibet University (TU), Lhasa, China, and was a research fellow at the Lumbini International Research Institute (LIRI), Lumbini, Nepal.

Since 2014 he is working at the University of Hamburg as a research associate and lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) for Classical and Colloquial Tibetan.

His field of interest lies in the cultural and religious history of the Tibetan cultural realm and its related literature. He has published articles on topics such as the history of the Ngor and Sakya traditions, Buddhist ascetic traditions, vegetarianism, book culture, and Tibetan art. His recent book publications are Vajradhara in Human Form: The Life and Times of Ngor chen Kun dga’ bzang po (2017) and The Ngor Branch Monastery of Go mig (sTeng rgyud) in Spiti (2019). He is the founder of Ngor’s Textual Treasures, an interactive web application presenting the results of an ongoing cataloguing project of a collection of manuscripts from Ngor monastery.