Trine Brox

Short presentation

Deputy Head of Department | Research 
As the Deputy Head of Department | Research, I am part of the department's management team and contribute to the day-to-day management of the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies. My main responsibility is to manage the development of the department’s research, which includes 

• chairing the department Research Committee,
• representing the department in the Faculty of Humanities Research Committee (FFU),
• supporting the overall management and strategic objectives of the department,
• developing and launching initiatives to support and strengthen the local research environment,
• developing strategies to attract external research funding,
• improving internal review processes,
• securing the high level and diversity of research, and
• together with the department’s management team, implementing and informing about the university’s data management policy, as well as developing and reporting on the annual risk assessment.

I am particularly engaged in our young faculty and work closely with the PhD-coordinator in relation to the operation, organisation, and development of the PhD-programme at our department, including the recruitment of new PhD-fellows, career development seminars for young faculty, and conducting PDRs with postdocs and PhD-fellows. Also, as a member of the University of Copenhagen’s mentor corps, I serve as a mentor for assistant professors. Additionally, I am happy to work as an advisor for PhDs, postdocs, and MSC-fellows at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

Primary fields of research

Current research projects include:

(1) WASTE: Consumption and Buddhism in the age of garbage: The project aims to draw attention to the global waste crisis by investigating the waste output attendant to a religion that is often portrayed as anti-materialist: Buddhism. The project investigates consumption practices, waste imaginaries, and waste trajectories in six Buddhist communities. By exploring waste as an exemplary object through which to forge collaborative knowledge production, the project bridges religious studies, anthropology, language-based area studies, and discard studies. It argues that the perceptions and practices concerned with consumption and its varied afterlives as waste are crucial for understanding contemporary Buddhism. More broadly, the project aims to understand the importance and role of religion in the generation and interpretation of waste. Veluxfonden is funding the project and a research team of six-members from September 2021 until March 2026.

(2) Buddhism, Business and Believers. The project enquires into contemporary relations between economy and Buddhism. The aim is to gain novel insights into the manner that Buddhism becomes an agent mediating distinctions between virtue and value, spirituality and materiality, gifts and commodities – and therefore also subscribes meaning to objects, actions and human relations. The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities (Feb. 2016 - Aug. 2021) funds this international, collaborative and interdisciplinary research project. Additionally, the Carlsberg Foundation has granted funding towards a post.doc. position that is organised under the BBB-umbrella and two years of expenses (Sept. 2015 - Feb. 2018). The project brings together scholars from various fields, such as language-based area studies, religious studies, anthropology and economics, in order to ensure disciplinary diversity and expertise covering a range of Buddhist traditions and geographies. 

(3) Tibetan Materialities: Material culture plays a critical role in constructing Tibetan worlds, yet its presence remains under-theorised in the field of Tibetan Studies. Only recently has a body of research started to emerge, yet there remain few forums dedicated to ideas of Tibetan Materiality. In response to this, Emma Martin (The University of Manchester), Diana Lange (Universität Hamburg) and myself have created the Tibetan Materialities Research Group; an international academic forum focused on collaborative, critical thinking and writing for the purpose of shaping new conceptual frameworks, finding synergies for future collaborations, producing conference papers, and writing academic outputs. The group discuss ongoing research and disrupt current approaches to materiality by considering socially constructed materiality, but also the materials constituting things. This initiative grew out of our collaboration over the blog Object Lessons from Tibet & the Himalayas. Find our blog here: https://objectlessonsfromtibetblog.wordpress.com/

Teaching

Tibet

Tibetans in exile

Tibetan Buddhism

Contemporary Buddhism

Minorities in China

Cultural translation

Academic writing and argumentation

Methods and research design in Asia Studies