Stefan Baums

I teach Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali language and literature and South Asian Buddhism at the Institute for Indian and Tibetan Studies of the University of Munich and serve as lead researcher of the Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra project at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Before joining the University of Munich, I held research and teaching posts at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, and Leiden University, and was a Visiting Professor of South Asian and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My research interests include Buddhist philology and epigraphy, the beginnings of written Buddhist literature, the interaction of written and oral modes of text transmission, the development of Buddhist hermeneutics, and the description of Gāndhārī language and literature. My current work focuses on the decipherment and edition of three Gāndhārī birch‐bark manuscripts containing commentaries on early Buddhist verses, and on a comprehensive study of the historical connections and exegetical principles of this group of verse commentaries and the related Gāndhārī Saṃgītisūtra commentary. I am editor (with Andrew Glass) of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī, co‐editor of the Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series, academic lead of the Research Environment for Ancient Documents (READ) software development project, and epigraphist for the Italian Archeological Mission in Pakistan.

Stefan Baums, Ph.D.
Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München
Geschwister‐Scholl‐Platz 1
80539 München
Germany
baums@lmu.de