Jonathan Silk

Jonathan Silk
Competition: US & Canada
A scholar of Buddhist traditions, Jonathan A. Silk studied in the United States at Oberlin College and the University of Michigan, and in Japan at Kyoto and Ryūkoku Universities. His work primarily focuses on Indian Buddhism and its sources preserved in Chinese and Tibetan translations, as well as on the interaction of Chinese and Tibetan Buddhisms. He taught at Grinnell College, Western Michigan University, Yale and UCLA, before joining the faculty of Leiden University in 2007. He works in a variety of languages, chiefly Sanskrit, Classical Chinese and Tibetan, and makes free use of the riches of scholarship in modern Japanese. He has published 6 books, 10 edited volumes, and more than 75 scholarly papers, as well as numerous book reviews and other contributions. Long-serving co-Editor-in-Chief of the flagship Indo-Iranian Journal, he is the founding editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. He was awarded a VICI grant from the NWO (Dutch National Science Foundation) in 2010, and a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant in 2017. In 2016 he was elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen [KNAW]).