INCENTER

EntanglINg CENTERs: Religious, cultural and political interactions between the Khitan Empire, the Chinese Song Dynasty, the Tangut Empire and local Tibetan rulers between the 10th and 13th centuries

This research project deals with the contacts and exchanges between different centers of power coexisting in pre-modern Asia during a time of geo-political reorganization between the 10th and the 13th centuries. This project revolves around the question of religious, cross-cultural, and political contacts between the Khitan Empire, the Chinese Song Dynasty, the Tangut Empire, and Tibetan Local Rulers: contending centers of power where Buddhism was practiced on a local level or was a state-sponsored religion.

Based on the approach of comparative analysis of sources in Chinese and Tibetan and on various types of documents (textual, epigraphic, and visual sources) this research will highlight, by trying to get out from the sino-centric perspective, how and to what extent these centers were entangled and how they constructed, represented and legitimized themselves to each other from a religious, cultural, and political point of view.

Workshop

The Incenter project announces the following workshop: Entangled Histories: at the Intersection of Religion and Politics in Pre Modern Societies. The workshop will take place at CERES on October 6th and 7th and will gather several scholars working on pre Modern Asia. The keynote lecture will be provided by Professor Naomi Standen (University of Birmingham and University of Oxford). More details will be shared soon.

Publications

Monography and Book Chapter:

2026 (forthcoming), Sino-Tibetan Diplomacy between the 7th and the 9th Centuries AD. Rulers & Elites Series, Brill: Leiden.

2026 (in press), "Vers la fin des grands empires : la Chine des Tang et l’Empire tibétain en 800", in Geneviève Bührer-Thierry (ed.), Le monde en 800. Taillandier: Paris.

2026 (in press), "Governing through non-official Proxies. Women in the Diplomatic Activities of the Tibetan Imperial Court", in Ian MacCormack, Fernanda Pirie, Daniel Wojahn (eds.), Tibetan Rulers: Traditional Practices and Historic Ideologies. Vajra Academics: Kathmandou, pp. 31-56.

Peer-reviewed Article:

2024, with Alla Sizova and Nathalie Monnet, "Documents from the National Library of France related to the first Tibetan manuscripts in Europe and early Russian-French academic relations", in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, pp. 12-32.

Conferences and Presentations

May 2026 – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, with Joanna Bialek: "Language (mis)use in naming-policies: The case of the Tibetan Empire
and its misnomer Tǔbō"

November 2025 – Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes Paris, with Marta Sernesi (invited): "Rolf Stein (1911–1999) et les études tibétaines à l’École pratique des hautes études : la photothèque du Centre de Documentation sur l’Aire Tibétaine (CDAT)".

August 2025 – FAU Erlangen (invited): "The Life and the Identity of the Tibetan Lun Boyan (c. 804-855) in China according to his entombed epitaph".

January 2025 – Centre de la Recherche sur les Civilisation de l’Asie Orientale, Paris: "Les traités de paix sino-tibétains entre 706 et 822. Discours officiels, cérémonies, vocabulaire, et contenu d’après les sources textuelles chinoises et les sources épigraphiques tibétaines".

November 2024 – Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Mittagsforum: "Entangling Centers: Religious, Cultural, and Political Interactions between the Khitan Empire, the Chinese Song Dynasty, the Tangut Empire, and Tibetan Local Rulers between the 10th and the 13th Centuries".

September 2024 – Academia Sinica, Taipei (invited): "Marcelle Lalou. A Tibetologist in 20th- Century France".

June 2024 – Bordeaux University: "Le fonds photographique du Centre de la Documentation sur l’Aire Tibétaine de l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes : passé, présent et futur d’une collection photographique exceptionnelle".

March 2024 – University Ca’ Foscari Venise: "I trattati di pace tra la corte imperiale tibetana e la corte cinese dei Tang".

November 2023 – Alexander von Humboldt meeting in : "Poster presentation of the project Incenter".