After completing her M.A. in Eurasian Studies from Indiana University, Nicole Willock earned dual PhD degrees (both awarded 2011) from IU's Department of Central Eurasian Studies and Department of Religious Studies. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University.
Willock presented her interdisciplinary work spanning religious studies, history, literary studies, and social theory in a book talk at IU during the fall of 2021. She offered new insight into the categories of religion and the secular, the role of Tibetan Buddhist leaders in modern China, and the contested ground of Tibet. At home in Chinese, various dialects of Tibetan, and German, she has published widely on the historical, biographical, and literary traditions of Tibet, and on the relation between the sacred and the secular as conceptualized by Tibetan scholars. Her first book, Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China was published this past April by Columbia University Press to rave reviews: it has been called “highly original,” “deeply inspiring,” and “one of the most important contributions to the history of Sino-Tibetan relations in the second half of the twentieth century to date.”