Bryan J. Cuevas

Bryan J. Cuevas (born 1967) is an American Tibetologist and historian of religion. He is the John F. Priest Professor of Religion and Director of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at Florida State University, where he specializes in Tibetan Buddhist history, literature, and culture.

Cuevas was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was educated at Emory University, receiving a B.A. in Philosophy in 1989, and at the University of Virginia, an M.A. in History of Religions and Buddhist Studies in 1993, and his doctorate in Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in 2000.

Cuevas has been a Member of the Institute For Advanced Study and has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and has been book review editor for the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies. Cuevas's research focuses on Tibetan history and historiography, hagiography and biographical literature, Buddhist popular religion, the social history of death and death-related practices, and the politics of magic and ritual power in premodern Tibetan societies, from roughly the eleventh through the early eighteenth centuries. His work has received fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

• The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat: The Life of Ra Lotsawa. Translation with introduction and notes. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015.
• Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (Paperback edition, 2011).
• The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations. Co-edited with Jacqueline I. Stone. Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism Series 20. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007 (Paperback edition, 2011).
• Power, Politics, and the Reinvention of Tradition: Tibet in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Co-edited with Kurtis R. Schaeffer. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
• The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 (Paperback edition, 2006).