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DrFlavio Geisshuesler

Senior Lecturer

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Orcid identifier0000-0001-6735-977X (opens in a new tab)⁠
  • Senior Lecturer
    Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

RESEARCH INTERESTs

  • Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen studies — The "Great Perfection" (rdzogs chen) tradition, with a particular focus on sky-gazing meditation (thod rgal), visionary contemplative systems, and the textual, ritual, and mythic worlds of the Nyingma "Old School."
  • Pre-Buddhist Tibet and comparative Inner Asian religion — The indigenous religious substrata that shaped the early Great Perfection, including early Bön, sky and vitality cults, and ritual hunting complexes, read comparatively against wider Siberian and Inner Asian materials.
  • Meditation, trauma, and the cognitive science of religion — Contemplative practice as a response to individual and collective crisis; dissociation, attachment, and trauma in the formation of religious traditions; the "7E" model of the religious mind.
  • Critical meditation studies — The historical and cross-cultural study of meditation as a cultural technology, and a scholarly critique of the dominant contemporary reduction of contemplative practice to a technique of relaxation and stress management.
  • Ernesto de Martino and the Italian history of religions — De Martino's concept of the "crisis of presence," his engagement with Croce, Gramsci, Cassirer, Heidegger, Eliade, and Lévi-Strauss, and the parapsychological and Weimar-scientific background of twentieth-century religious studies.
  • Continental philosophy of religion — Nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of subjectivity, agency, transcendence, and meaning-making, from German phenomenology and hermeneutics to French poststructuralism and their Italian historicist counterparts.
  • Interdisciplinary and comparative method — The epistemological foundations of the humanities; integrating philological, historical, anthropological, psychological, and cognitive approaches to the study of religion; the history and future of religious studies as a discipline.
  • Sanskrit, Tibetan, and classical Indo-Tibetan philology — Primary-source access to Buddhist, tantric, and pre-Buddhist Tibetan materials; the place of classical-language training in the comparative study of Asian religious cultures.