Curriculum vitae Updated October 2026

The route and the record.

Two ways into my work: the living CV follows the places and turns behind it; the full CV sets out appointments, publications, teaching, and service.

Flavio A. Geisshuesler walking through a colonnade.

01Living CV

The route was not straight.

Five stations on a time scale from 1986 to 2024: Zurich, Siena, Mizoram, Jerusalem, Sydney. A dashed straight line runs the length of the frame; the route leaves it early, crosses it four times, and has not come back to it by 2024.
  1. 1986Zurich
  2. 2004Siena
  3. 2014Mizoram
  4. 2019Jerusalem
  5. 2024Sydney

The living CV follows the places, studies and changes of direction behind the work. Each station belongs to the story; the connection between them is the question of how people are formed and transformed.

  1. ca. 1986Beginnings

    Before the path had a name.

    Zurich, Switzerland

    Curiosity came first: an openness to what lay beyond the immediately familiar.

  2. 1980s–1990sRoots

    A multilingual childhood.

    Zurich, Switzerland

    Swiss German, Standard German, English, and French taught me early that language changes how the world is seen.

  3. 2004Crossroads

    Economics or meaning?

    Siena, Italy

    A summer of Italian made the choice irreversible: I turned toward religion, language, and meaning.

  4. 2005Horizons

    My first real elsewhere.

    Denver, Colorado, USA

    English became an environment and adaptation became part of the education.

  5. 2006Awakening

    A thousand kilometers on foot.

    Camino de Santiago, Spain

    The Camino moved religion from the page into the body: repetition, fatigue, weather, silence, and road.

  6. 2006–2008Foundation

    Close reading becomes a method.

    Lausanne, Switzerland

    Tibetan and Biblical Hebrew turned curiosity into philological discipline.

  7. 2008Immersion

    Language as immersion.

    Mussoorie, India

    Hindi and Sanskrit became ways of attending, not simply tools for translation.

  8. 2009–2010Wandering

    Learning without mastery.

    35 countries / Four continents

    A year of movement trained orientation under uncertainty: enter, listen, decide, move.

  9. 2010Solitude

    Months without speaking.

    South Island, New Zealand

    A solitary retreat made attention an environment rather than a topic.

  10. 2010–2011Discipline

    A year on the mat.

    Asheville and the Blue Ridge, USA

    Retreat became daily practice, and the decision to pursue a PhD became clear.

  11. 2011–2014Rigor

    Where the questions met resistance.

    Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

    At the University of Virginia, contemplative questions met the resistance of Nyingma texts and Tibetology.

  12. 2014Edges

    At the edges of categories.

    Mizoram and Manipur, India

    Fieldwork with Bnei Menashe communities complicated easy ideas of identity, memory, and belonging.

  13. 2014–2015Archives

    The archive as teacher.

    Rome, Italy

    Ernesto de Martino’s papers showed how arguments and worlds are rebuilt from fragments.

  14. 2015–2016Altitude

    Reading where the manuals lived.

    Kathmandu, Nepal

    Tibetan sky-gazing became both a historical problem and a contemplative inheritance.

  15. 2017Connections

    Beyond the Anglophone archive.

    St Petersburg, Russia

    A Russian-language lineage of Tibetan and Inner Asian scholarship opened.

  16. 2018–2019Dual defense

    Two PhDs, one question.

    Bern / Charlottesville

    European crisis and Tibetan contemplation converged: how are human beings formed and transformed?

  17. 2019–2024Synthesis

    Where the sky-gazing book was written.

    Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel

    Philology, history, and contemplative practice entered a single argument.

  18. 2023–2025Organizations

    Formation enters the boardroom.

    Paris, France

    An Executive MBA at HEC Paris carried the question of how people are formed into strategy, finance, and leadership: the rooms where decisions about AI are now made.

  19. 2024Leadership

    Change made practical.

    London, England

    Study at the LSE connected organizational change with the realities of institutions and power: the forces that decide how a new technology changes working lives.

  20. 2024Exchange

    Ancient routes, future economies.

    Doha / Riyadh

    Conversations in Doha and Riyadh placed cultural inheritance beside rapid technological change, and asked what a tradition can offer a future built at speed.

  21. 2024–presentNow

    The next academic chapter.

    Sydney, Australia

    At the University of Sydney, the language journey returns to the classroom through Tibetan Buddhism and meditation, and the history of religions meets a question of our own time: life with artificial intelligence.

  22. 2026–presentIntegration

    The inquiry goes public.

    Sydney / Global

    Erratic Intelligence, the first volume of the Technopsychology Trilogy, and an advisory practice of the same name bring the question into public and institutional life: what must people still judge for themselves when machines produce convincing answers?

Curriculum Vitae

Flavio A. Geisshuesler

Khyentse Macready Senior Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism
School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Sydney

flavio.geisshuesler@sydney.edu.au · ORCID 0000-0001-6735-977X

Research Profile

I study how religious concepts and practices respond to crisis and institutional transformation: from the theory of crisis and presence in European Religionsgeschichte, through Indo-Tibetan contemplative systems, to their contemporary reconfiguration in secular and technological settings. Trained in the history of religions in Switzerland, Italy, and the United States, I hold doctorates from Bern and Virginia, carried out extended doctoral fieldwork in Nepal (2016–2017), and spent my postdoctoral years in Jerusalem (2019–2024); since 2024 I have been Khyentse Macready Senior Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. My work moves between the European history of religions, its philosophical sources, and Asian philology. Three strands organize my research:

I. Theory, Method, and the History of the Discipline. European history of religions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the Italian school and Ernesto de Martino in dialogue with twentieth-century European philosophy; crisis, critique, and comparison as methodological categories; cognitive and cultural theories of religion. Sustained through collaboration with the Associazione Internazionale Ernesto de Martino and Sapienza Università di Roma, and carried into both current projects as their shared theoretical resource.

II. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Its Contemplative Repertoire. Buddhist meditation as a historically changing repertoire whose purposes include, but are not exhausted by, calm; Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) Buddhism and its prehistory; sky-gazing, tantric sādhana, subtle-body, visionary, and mind-training practices; Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan textual scholarship; and the successive processes of translation and institutional reconfiguration through which contemplative practices enter new settings. Pursued through Beyond Calm, which develops the Bloomsbury monograph from one Great Perfection practice into a selected, contrastive corpus of Indo-Tibetan meditation.

III. Religion, Technology, and the Human. The religious semantics of artificial-intelligence discourse: apocalypse and salvation as two sides of a single narrative; creation and creator; revelation, where opaque systems are read as sources of truth; judgment; the contested moral status of the non-human person. Alongside this, the medial regime of generative systems: authorship, authority, and the aesthetics of machine-produced religious material. Pursued as the project Religious Grammars of Artificial Intelligence, which brings the questions of strand I to bear on the technological present.

Academic Appointments

2024–present
Khyentse Macready Senior Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism, School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Sydney, Australia. Named, philanthropically endowed position.
2024
Visiting Professor, Tergar Institute, Kathmandu, Nepal (Fall 2024)
2019–2024
Postdoctoral Fellow, Departments of Comparative Religion and Asian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
2018–2019
Postdoctoral Fellow, Institut für Religionswissenschaft und Zentralasiatische Kulturwissenschaft, University of Bern, Switzerland
2014–2016
Cultore della Materia (honorary fellow with teaching and examination duties in Religious Studies), Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy

Education

2019
Ph.D., History of Religions, University of Virginia, USA. Dissertation: Prisons of Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Study of Contemplative Practices in Great Perfection Buddhism
2018
Ph.D., History of Religions, University of Bern, Switzerland. Dissertation: Crisis and Critique in the History of Religions: Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) in Italy and Beyond
2013
M.A., History of Religions, University of Virginia, USA
2008
B.A., History of Religions, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Publications

Research Monographs

2024
Tibetan Sky-Gazing Meditation and the Pre-History of Great Perfection Buddhism: The Skullward Leap Technique and the Quest for Vitality. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Open access, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. doi:10.5040/9781350428843
Selected reviews: Dylan Esler, The Journal of Religion 106, no. 3 (July 2026): 344–346; David DiValerio, Journal of Contemplative Studies, forthcoming.
2021
The Life and Work of Ernesto de Martino: Italian Perspectives on Apocalypse and Rebirth in the Modern Study of Religion. Numen Book Series 173. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Open access, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. doi:10.1163/9789004457720

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

2025
“Crisis, Culture, and Creation: Ernesto de Martino’s Ethos of Transcendence Beyond Cassirer and Heidegger.” CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism 26 (Spring 2025): 117–134. Special issue De Martino and the Arts. Open access. doi:10.13135/2281-6658/12176
2022
“Meditation Between Open Skies and Deep Ravines: Revisiting the Ethos of Freedom in Great Perfection (Dzogchen) Buddhism.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 45: 39–71. View at Peeters
2020
“From Grounded Identity to Receptive Creativity: The Mythical-Historical Formation of the Nyingma School and the Potential of Collective Trauma.” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 30: 233–269. doi:10.16893/IJBTC.2020.06.30.1.233
2020
“Luminous Bodies, Playful Children, and Abusive Grandmothers: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disorganized Attachment in the Early History of Great Perfection (rDzogs chen) Buddhism.” Religions 11 (3): 114. Open access. doi:10.3390/rel11030114
2019
“When Buddhas Dissociate: A Psychological Perspective on the Origins of Great Perfection Buddhism (rDzogs chen).” Cogent Psychology 6 (1): 1707055. Open access. doi:10.1080/23311908.2019.1707055
2019
“The 7E Model of the Human Mind: Articulating a Plastic Self for the Cognitive Science of Religion.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 19: 450–476. doi:10.1163/15685373-12340069
2019
“A Parapsychologist, an Anthropologist, and a Vitalist Walk into a Laboratory: Ernesto de Martino, Mircea Eliade, and a Forgotten Chapter in the Disciplinary History of Religious Studies.” Religions 10 (5): 304. Open access. doi:10.3390/rel10050304

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

2024
“Direct Transcendence: A Cognitive Perspective on Meditation as an Intentional Transformative Experience.” In Intentional Transformative Experiences: Theorizing Self-Cultivation in Religion and Esotericism, edited by Sarah Perez, Bastiaan van Rijn, and Jens Schlieter, 47–70. Berlin: De Gruyter. Open access. doi:10.1515/9783110909883-003
2024
“Framing the Sky of Skullward Leap: Meditation as a Contemplative System.” In Traditions, Translations and Transitions in the Cultural History of Tibet, the Himalayas and Mongolia, edited by Donatella Rossi, Davor Antonucci, Michela Clemente, and Davide Torri, 143–160. Rome: ISMEO.
In press
“From Bardo to Brain: Tibetan Contemplation Meets Predictive Processing.” In Contemplative Studies in Tibetan Context, edited by Michael Sheehy and Marc-Henri Deroche. Leiden: Brill.

Book Reviews

2016
Review of Philippe Bornet, Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité: Mondes juifs et indiens anciens (2010). Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies.

Doctoral Dissertations

2019
Prisons of Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Study of Contemplative Practices in Great Perfection Buddhism. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia.
2018
Crisis and Critique in the History of Religions: Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) in Italy and Beyond. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bern.

Public Scholarship

2026
Erratic Intelligence: Leadership in the Age of AI. Sydney: Errāticus Press, 2026 (ISBN 978-1-923789-00-5). Book details First volume of the Technopsychology Trilogy, written for a general readership on judgment, formation, and human agency under conditions of automation; two further volumes (The Cuckoo in the Loop; The Tasting Animal) are in preparation for 2027. Read the Introduction
2024
“Teaching with AI: Revolutionising Education While Honouring Tradition.” Teaching@Sydney, Educational Innovation, The University of Sydney. Read online

Work in Preparation

Monograph
Beyond Calm: Meditation as a Cultural Technology of Crisis, Vision, and Agency. Argues that Indo-Tibetan Buddhist meditation is not a technology of calm but of vision, vitality, and agency (a practice directed at the world rather than away from it) and extends the philological and religio-historical work of the Bloomsbury monograph from rdzogs chen to the wider contemplative corpus.

Competitive Fellowships and Grants

All awards were obtained in open competition on the basis of external peer review.

2021, 2024
Swiss National Science Foundation, Open Access Publication Grants (Brill and Bloomsbury monographs)
2021
Azrieli Foundation, International Postdoctoral Fellowship, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (three years)
2021
Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (three years)
2020
Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (two years)
2019
Khyentse Foundation, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (two years)
2017
Dr. Josephine de Karman Trust, Dissertation Completion Fellowship, University of Bern
2016
U.S. Department of Education, Fulbright–Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, Nepal (twelve months)
2014
Swiss National Science Foundation, Doc.Mobility Fellowship, Sapienza Università di Roma (eighteen months)
2013
U.S. Department of Education, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, Tibetan, University of Virginia

Current Research

Beyond Calm
Meditation as a Cultural Technology of Crisis, Vision, and Agency: repositions Buddhist meditation as an active, world-engaging practice rather than a technique of calm, and carries the Bloomsbury monograph forward from rdzogs chen to the wider corpus of Indo-Tibetan contemplative practice. Research monograph in preparation.
Religion and AI
Religious Grammars of Artificial Intelligence: the religious semantics of AI discourse (apocalypse and salvation, creation, revelation, judgment, the non-human person) read with the discipline’s historical instruments. Begun in Sydney: invited lecture at Macquarie University (May 2026) and a symposium paper at the University of Sydney (September 2026).

Teaching

The University of Sydney (2024–present)

  • Tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet (Semester 1, 2024 and Semester 2, 2026)
  • Buddhism, Meditation, and Brain (Semester 2, 2025)
  • Bodhicaryāvatāra: Advanced Reading Seminar in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and AI (Semester 2, 2026)
  • Sanskrit Introductory 1, new unit (Semester 1, 2026)
  • Introduction to Tibetan Language and Culture 1 and 2 (2024, 2025, 2026)

Tergar Institute, Kathmandu (Visiting Professor, Fall 2024)

  • Introduction to Prajñāpāramitā Literature and Mahāyāna Buddhism

University of Basel (Spring 2022)

  • “Ritual” and “Meditation” in Buddhism: A Fresh Look at Two Key Concepts in Religious Studies

University of Fribourg (Fall 2021)

  • History and Practice of Meditation

Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2020–2021)

  • Thinking about Meditation in Buddhism and Beyond (Spring 2021)
  • Non-duality in Indian and Tibetan Thought (Spring 2020)

University of Bern (2019–2020)

  • “Mindfulness” (sati): A Buddhist Practice and its Reception in Global Modernity (Fall 2020)
  • Buddhism, Meditation, and Cognitive Science (Fall 2019)
  • Old Questions, New Answers? The Italian School of the History of Religions (Spring 2019)
  • The Tibetan Renaissance and the Tibetanization of Buddhism (Spring 2019)

University of Virginia (Fall 2017)

  • Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism

Supervision

  • Completed the Accelerated Lead Supervisor Program for registration as a lead doctoral supervisor, University of Sydney (2026).
  • Auxiliary supervisor of an M.A. thesis on a Gāndhārī birch-bark manuscript, The University of Sydney (current).
  • Directed advanced study in Classical Tibetan, The University of Sydney (current).

Academic Leadership and Service

Program Development

  • Responsible since 2024 for Tibetan-language teaching and Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Sydney.
  • Designed and introduced three new units of study: an introductory Sanskrit unit, an advanced Sanskrit–Tibetan reading seminar, and a unit on Buddhism, meditation, and the cognitive sciences.

Editorial, Advisory, and Review Activity

  • Advisory Board, ARGOS: Perspektiven in der Religionswissenschaft
  • Peer review for Journal of Dharma Studies, Journal of Cognition and Culture, Religions, Religion Compass, Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses, Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia, International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture, and Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura
  • Panel convenor, “Ernesto de Martino’s Multiple Identities: Between Coherence and Contradiction,” 16th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR), Bern, 2018

Professional Memberships

Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Religionswissenschaft (SGR–SSSR) · European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) · American Academy of Religion (AAR) · International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS) · International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) · International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR) · Associazione Italiana di Studi Tibetani, Himalayani e Mongoli (AISTHiM) · Associazione Internazionale Ernesto de Martino · Australasian Association of Buddhist Studies (AABS)

Selected Invited Lectures and Conference Papers

2026
“Erratic Intelligence: AI, Religion, and the Future of the Human.” Invited lecture, Minds and Intelligences Research Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney, May 20.
2025
Roundtable contribution, The Future of Contemplation, The University of Sydney (in conjunction with the visiting professorship of David Germano), October 29.
2024
“Beyond Mindfulness: Empowering Leadership with Tibetan Buddhist Wisdom.” Public lecture, Alumni Festival, The University of Sydney, November 30.
2022
“Cosmic Eggs, Domesticated Sheep, and Flying Kings: An Overview of Pre-Buddhist Motifs in Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) Buddhism.” 16th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS), Prague, July 3–9.
2021
“Ernesto de Martino and the Eschatological Turn in Continental Philosophy.” Invited lecture, Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Cologne, November 30.
2021
“Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) as a Classic Figure in the Twentieth-Century Study of Religion.” Jahrestagung der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Religionswissenschaft (SGR–SSSR), Zurich, March 12–13.

Languages and International Research Experience

Native: German and Swiss German. Fluent professional: English, Italian, French, Hebrew. Advanced working: Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Modern Tibetan. Research languages: Classical Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Biblical Hebrew (advanced); Pāli (intermediate); Classical Chinese and Mongolian (basic). Additional language study: Russian, Persian, and Yiddish (intermediate); Chinese and Arabic (basic).

Israel (2007; 2019–2024): postdoctoral research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Modern Hebrew at the Rothberg International School. Italy (2003; 2014–2016; 2018): archival research in Rome; Sapienza University of Rome; Italian language study at the University of Siena. Nepal (2008; 2012; 2016–2017): Tibetan and Nepali language study, Buddhist Studies, and dissertation research at Kathmandu University, Rangjung Yeshe Institute, and the Centre for Buddhist Studies. India (2006; 2008; 2012): Hindi at Landour Language School and research in Mizoram and Manipur. United States (2004; 2009–2014; return for teaching in 2017): graduate study and teaching at the University of Virginia. Shorter research and language stays in Russia (2018) and Germany (2012).

Further Qualifications

2025
Executive MBA, HEC Paris, France
2024
INSEAD Coaching Certificate, INSEAD, France (systems-psychodynamic tradition)
2024
Certificate in Change and Leadership, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK