- divaleri@uwm.edu
- Holton Hall 325
- CV
David DiValerio
- Associate Professor, History and Religious Studies
- Director, Religious Studies Program
Education
PhD, University of Virginia, 2011
MA, University of Virginia, 2005
BA, Wesleyan University, 2003
Office Hours
I am on sabbatical during the 2024-2025 academic year.
Courses Taught
Hist 131 - World History to 1500
Hist 284 - Buddhism Across Asia
Hist 370 - Tibetan Buddhism
Hist 940 - Marx and Religion in Tibet
Hist 940 - Technologies of the Self
RelSt 101 - Introduction to World Religions
RelSt 350 - Saints and Sainthood
RelSt 395 - Theories of Religion
Research Interests
My research advances our understanding of the history of tantric and ascetic practice in the Tibetan cultural sphere by applying novel methodologies to understudied archives.
Mountain Dharma: Meditative Retreat and the Tibetan Ascetic Self (Columbia University Press, 2025) grows out of a comprehensive reading of the literature offering instruction for how to conduct an individual long-term retreat. By comparing how twenty-two authors have differently problematized six orienting concerns in the eremitic endeavor—place, people, food, sources of danger, the spiritual lineage, and time—this study tracks developments in Tibetan ascetic discourse and practice from the twelfth century to the twentieth. The book demonstrates that an attitude of lived deferential reverence has affected expectations across these diverse aspects of a retreatant’s comportment. This is a tendency towards adopting forms of ascetic abiding different from those of earlier generations of enlightened masters, which I argue has increasingly served to define the meditator as a being in time. By viewing instructions for how to live in retreat as technologies of self, this study focuses our attention on how the history of this tradition has been driven by evolving notions of personhood. This work was facilitated by fellowships from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation and UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
As a follow-up to Mountain Dharma, I am currently researching the practice of communal three-year three-month tantric retreat in contemporary globalized Tibetan Buddhism, based on fieldwork in Tibet, Nepal, Portugal, France, and the United States.
I am also working on a translation of the epic Kagyu-centric history, the Scholar’s Feast (chos ‘byung mkhas pa’i dga’ ston), by the second Pawo incarnation, Tsuklak Trengwa (1504–1564/66).
As for my previous work, The Holy Madmen of Tibet (Oxford University Press, 2015) is an historical examination of the phenomenon of the “holy madman” (smyon pa) in Tibetan Buddhism, conducted through a networked reading of hagiography and other sources. The Life of the Madman of Ü (Oxford, 2016) is a translation of the life story of one of these figures—Künga Zangpo (1458-1532), renowned as dbus smyon—which was composed by his disciples.
In addition to my work in the Department of History, I serve as the director of UWM’s undergraduate Religious Studies Program, with which I have a dual-appointment.