Alice Travers is a historian of Tibet at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. She is attached to the Tibet, Bhutan and Tibetan Cultural Area team (TBACT) of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l'Asie orientale (CRCAO, UMR 8155). His current research focuses on the social history of Tibet before 1959, the history of the political institutions of the Dalai Lama government, the Ganden Phodrang (1642-1959), and the military history of this government.
After university training in history, anthropology and Tibetan, she conducted her research into the social history of Tibet : first on the nobility of central Tibet between 1895 and 1959, a hereditary elite from which the lay civil servants of the Ganden Phodrang administration were recruited ; then, between 2011 and 2021, on the intermediary elites in central Tibet at the beginning of the 20th century, as part of two successive French-German research projects (ANR-DFG), Social History of Tibetan Societies, 1642-1959 (SHTS) and Social Status in Tibetan Societies (TibStat).
This work led her to the history of the Tibetan army of the Ganden Phodrang (1642-1959), in which many of these elites served, as part of a research project funded by the European Research Council (TibArmy, ERC starting grant), which she directed between 2016 and 2023.
She is the author or co-editor of several volumes devoted to the social and military history of Tibet : Taxation in Tibetan Societies: Rules, Practices and Discourses (Brill, 2023) ; Marching into View: The Tibetan Army in Historic Photographs 1895-1959 (edition-tethys, 2022) ; Defence and Offence: Armour and Weapons in Tibetan Culture (Annali di Ca' Foscari, 2021) ; Asian Influences on Tibetan Military History between the17th and20th Centuries (Revue d'Études Tibétaines, 2022) ; Buddhism and the Military in Tibet during the Ganden Phodrang period (1642-1959) (Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 2018) and Commerce and Communities: Social and Political Status and the Exchange of Goods in Tibetan Societies (EB-Verlag, 2018) ; Tibetans who Escaped the Historian's Net. Studies in the Social History of Tibetan Societies (Vajra, 2013).
