Nicholas is a doctoral candidate from the Department for the Study of Religion. He researches scribes, correspondence networks, and the production of Buddhist texts in Central Asia, from the eighth to tenth centuries CE. Specifically, he works with Tibetan and Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang and the Tarim Basin, and is particularly interested in the use of Tibetan as a lingua franca of Buddhism, diplomacy, and administration on the eastern Silk Road. He is a member of the Book History and Print Culture collaborative program, and is the coordinator for Serai, an online collaboratory for pre-modern cross-cultural encounters, and for the 2016-2017 Jackman Humanities Initiative working group Digital Humanities: Tracking Sense, Space, and Time.
