Kevin G. Morales-Bernabe (2023) studies the Arts and Material Culture of the Buddhist World. His research encompasses topics related to death, dying, funerary rituals, and the afterlife in artistic traditions within tantric religions of South Asia. Kevin’s interests also include trans-regional exchange and religious interactions across Medieval South Asia and the Himalayas.
Kevin earned his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies and Art History from the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras campus (2019). In 2021, he completed his MPhil from the University of Oxford, where he developed his dissertation on the iconography of hell in Buddhist Art, both pre-modern and contemporary. He worked with the Museum Alliance of Puerto Rico as a research assistant on the project Échale un Ojo al Arte: Programa de Acción Ciudadana para la Protección del Patrimonio (2022), an ongoing initiative that seeks to create awareness of Puerto Rican cultural heritage, including the preservation of murals, sculptures, and monuments created for public spaces during the second half of the 20th century. Apart from engaging in archival research and in situ documentation, Kevin helped create didactic material for online modules intended for a general audience. In 2022, he was awarded the Dr. Hettie Elgood Scholarship to join SOAS - University of London’s Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art, which he completed in the summer of 2023.