Faculty Profiles

Natasha Mikles is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University, where she teaches courses on Buddhism, Chinese Religions, and Death and Dying. She received her Ph.D. from University of Virginia (2017) in History of Religions, with a specialization in Sino-Tibetan Buddhism and an M.A. degree in History of Religions from University of Chicago (2010). Mikles has augmented her academic work by studying at several universities in Asia as an international student, including Tibet University (2010-2011), Beijing Language and Culture University (2012), and Southwest Minzu University (2015).

Her first book, Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America (Columbia University Press, 2024), examines the myriad ways in which the experience of death affected Americans' religious understandings against the backdrop of the deadliest pandemic in a century. Mikles documents the diverse and powerful voices of those struggling to make sense of transforming identities, beliefs, and communities. In this way, the book tells the story of spiritual innovation, religious change, and the struggle to achieve personal and national self-understanding against the backdrop of mass casualties.

Mikles' next book project, Taming Gesar: A Tibetan Epic Between Buddhism, Secularity, and the State, focuses on the shifting roles of Himalayan hero and Buddhist protector Gesar of Ling. While historically a popular eastern Tibetan Buddhist deity, the figure of King Gesar of Ling has been transformed in the service of various stakeholders, including Qing dynasty leaders, western Theosophists, and the Buddhist institution. In his most recent iteration, Gesar has become secularized and commodified as a major tourist attraction in the contemporary Chinese state. Utilizing an innovative blend of fieldwork and textual analysis, Taming Gesar traces these transformations to ask how popular narratives like the Gesar epic serve as flexible and ever-changing tools in the public discourse between secularity and religion.