Leonard van der Kuijp

Who is Leonard van der Kuijp?

Leonard van der Kuijp is a Dutch professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies and former chair of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University.

Leonard van der Kuijp began his studies in mathematics, but then shifted his attention to Tibet. He received his master's degree at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

In 1993 van der Kuijp received the MacArthur Fellowship for "pioneering contributions to the study of Tibetan epistemology, biography and poetry.". Van der Kuijp worked with the Nepal Research Center of the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Washington in Seattle. In July 1995 he joined the faculty at Harvard University. In 1999, he founded the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, together with E. Gene Smith.

Van der Kuijp focuses his research primarily on the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history, Tibetan Buddhism and the relations of Tibet to Mongolia and China.

He coauthored An Early Tibetan Survey of Buddhist Literature which was published as volume 64 of the Harvard Oriental Series in 2008.