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Michael Sheehy
Michael Sheehy
Staff
Director of Research
ms4qm@virginia.edu
he/him

Michael R. Sheehy, Ph.D., is a Research Associate Professor and the Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. He is a meditation researcher and founding director of the CIRCL Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, a transdisciplinary experimental hub that studies contemplation in bodies and minds, cultures and ecologies, and intersubjectively. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies (JCS), a peer-reviewed open access journal that publishes original scholarship on diverse forms of contemplation. He is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies by courtesy and a faculty affiliate at the UVA Tibet Center.

Michael studies how meditation works – specifically, how the generative, dynamic, and ever-evolving processes of contemplation advance our understanding of being human and enhancing life. His research gives attention to historical contemplative practices in dialogue with contemporary discourses in the humanities, cultural psychology, and the cognitive sciences. In the CIRCL lab, their research investigates practices and experiences of contemplation through myriad lenses, including cultural, historical, phenomenological, and neurophysiological. 

For three years, Michael trained with scholars and meditation adepts in a Buddhist monastery in far eastern Tibet, and for twelve years, he worked in the field with monastic communities across the plateau to preserve rare Tibetan manuscripts. Over the past decade, he has collaborated with scientists on interdisciplinary research to illuminate the operations of distinct contemplative practices. As a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School his research focused on strategies to interface philosophical and first-person knowledge from contemplative traditions with neuroscience. At the Mind & Life Institute, he facilitated interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogues including Mind & Life Dialogues XXXII in Botswana and XXXIII in India with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is a lifelong honorary Mind & Life Research Fellow and co-chair of the Contemplative Studies unit at the American Academy of Religion. His work has been featured in Psyche magazine and National Geographic.

Michael has authored more than two dozen articles on topics ranging from models of mind to cognitive illusion and lucid dreaming to mindfulness and nondual meditation. He is coeditor of The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet (2019), and author of a forthcoming book on the little-known Jonang tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. His current book project weaves practices of attention, imagination, and embodiment from historical Tibetan meditation manuals into conversation with philosophy of mind, cultural psychology, health sciences, and neuroscience. With the University of Virginia Press, he coedits two book series, Varieties of Contemplative Experience and Traditions and Transformations in Tibetan Buddhism.

Personal website: https://michaelrsheehy.com/

UVA Religious Studies website: https://religiousstudies.as.virginia.edu/michael-sheehy

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