Kurtis Schaeffer is a member of the Faculty Research Council at the Contemplative Sciences Center. He is the Frances Myers Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His specialty is in the narrative and poetic literature of Buddhism in Tibet, India, and the Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan, and more broadly in the literary and religious cultures of Buddhism. He is co-director of the Religion, Race, & Democracy Lab, which publishes a podcast, Sacred & Profane, on the ways that religion shapes and is shaped by our daily lives. He is also co-director of The Sanctuary Lab that brings artists, humanists, and scientists together to explore ways in which religious and spiritual connections to special places impacts our perceptions of the environment and climate change. His many publications include a translation of The Life of the Buddha by Tenzin Chögyel (Penguin Classics, 2005), The Culture of the Book in Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2009), and Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of a Buddhist Poet Saint (Oxford University Press, 2005).