Workshop Event (TCAS): Approaching Tibetan ritual practices: A workshop in reading, analysing, and interpreting indigenous ritual texts

Organisers: Joanna Bialek (Trinity College Dublin) Valentina Punzi (École Pratique des Hautes Études-CRCAO)
Date: 29–30th June 2026 (all day)
Venue: Room 4074, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin

Registration: To register, please send an email to reading.Tibetan.rituals@gmail.com explaining your educational background and motivation for attending the workshop (max. 200 words). You will be notified of the registration within a week of submission.

The workshop intends to bring together scholars and students with a strong interest in exploring the extensive but largely understudied Tibetan literature related to early ritual practices, which appear contiguous with those still cultivated nowadays on the fringes of the cultural Tibetosphere among non-Tibetan-speaking communities. To foster research on old Tibetan ritual traditions, the workshop offers intensive reading sessions focused on a small selection of texts or passages from different historical periods and distinct, but usually unknown, places of origin. Despite the texts’ varying cultural backgrounds, we will look for their common linguistic, textual, and stylistic features or shared literary motifs to uncover potential influences of cultural contact.

Joanna Bialek, Ph.D., is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the project ‘Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs: Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction’ (TOMB) based at the Centre for Asian Studies (Trinity College Dublin). Bialek is working at the crossroads of historical linguistics and religious studies. She has published three books, Compounds and Compounding in Old Tibetan, A Textbook in Classical Tibetan, and Old Literary Tibetan, as well as articles on aspects of Old Tibetan grammar, history of the Tibetan Empire, Dunhuang manuscripts, and funerary practices on the Tibetan Plateau.

Valentina Punzi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC-funded project ‘PaganTibet’ based at the École Pratique d’Hautes Études in Paris. She received a Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies from L’Orientale University (Napoli, Italy) and Minzu University of China (Beijing, PRC), and a Ph.D. in Folklore Studies from the University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia) in cotutelle with the École Pratique d’Hautes Études. Her current research interest revolves around the narratological and performative study of Tibetan ritual manuscripts, the use of vernacular literacy, and the establishment of social authority among ritual specialists in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. She published articles on environmental knowledge, folk religion, and oral history among Tibetan communities in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands.