Professor Hartmann's engagement with Religious Studies arises out of a longstanding interest in religion as a force that shapes our experience of the world, and in the practices religions develop to transform that experience. After growing up in a multi-religious household, she encountered Buddhism as an undergraduate, and hasn't looked back since. She is comfortable in classical Tibetan, modern Tibetan, and Sanskrit, and also reads Chinese and Hindi. She has spent over a year and a half in various communities in Asia, including summers at a Buddhist nunnery in Ladakh, at the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives in Dharamsala, at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu, and at Sichuan University in Chengdu.
Her work focuses on the history of Tibetan pilgrimage to holy mountains and the goal of transforming perception while on pilgrimage, and she is currently working on a book on this topic. She is also interested in Buddhist ethics, vision and visuality, theories of place, and autobiographical writing. (Source Accessed Oct 5, 2021)
