Kelzang is an anthropologist whose work centres on Tibetan Buddhist and Indigenous Bon cultures. He teaches in the Tibetan program at the School of Culture, History, and Language. Kelzang is also an Associate at Harvard Asia Centre, Harvard University. 

Kelzang’s research uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to investigate how human experience are shaped by the intersections of religion, society, gender, health, migration, and the environment, with a regional focus on the eastern Himalayas and wider Tibetan Buddhist cultural areas. His research has been funded by the Alexander Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and the Americal Council of Learned Societies (USA), among others.

Kelzang’s first World of Worldly Gods (2023) was published by Oxford University of Press (New York) as part of the American Academy of Religion’s book series “Religion, Culture, and History”. It received an Honourable Mention for the E. Gene Smith Inner Asia Book Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies.

Kelzang received his PhD (2020) from ANU and has held research positions at leading universities. He was a Ho ECR Fellow in Buddhist Studies at ACLS (2025-2026), a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Heidelberg University (2023-2025), an ARI Postodcotoral Fellow at NUS (2022-2023), and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at LSE (2021-2023).

Anthropology, lived religion, ethnography, Buddhism, Bon, health and healing, kinship and gender, migration,  environment, Tibetan and Himalayan Studies