Per K. Sørensen

Per Kjeld Sørensen (born 18 December 1950, Denmark) is a prominent Danish Tibetologist who specialises in Tibetan and Himalayan history, literature and culture. Since 1994, he has been Professor of Central Asian Studies (Zentralasienwissenschaften, Tibetology and Mongol Studies) at Leipzig University, Germany.

Biography Sørensen was the first person to receive a Magister in Tibetology in Scandinavia. In 1990, Sørensen defended his doctoral thesis at Copenhagen, Divinity Secularized. An Inquiry into the Nature and Form of the Songs Ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama (Wien 1990).

Sørensen has teaching commitments and experience from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the United States. He was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Stipend (1991–92) in Bonn, Germany, a sojourn that resulted in one of his most well-known works, Tibetan Buddhist Historiography (1994).

From 1994 to 2017, he held the chair of Professor of Central Asian Studies (Zentralasienwissenschaften, Tibetology and Mongol Studies) at Leipzig University in Germany, He has held lectures around the world and is currently a board member of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS).

In 2015 he was a participant in the Tibet Research Group on “Tibetan Genealogies" at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, with Guntram Harzod (the head), Tsering Gyalpo (of Lhasa, Tibet) and Shen Weirong (of Beijing, China).

As of fall 2017, he is the Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley.