About Us
Site Managers
Dr Peter Pasedach
Peter Pasedach is a research associate at the department for Indology and Tibetology of Hamburg University. He is a Sanskritist specialising in court poetry, on which he leads a DFG-funded project, and yoga-related texts. He has taught Sanskrit and related topics in Hamburg, Göttingen and Leiden. He is actively involved in the building up of the focus Yoga Studies at Hamburg University.
Dr Christopher Miller
Christopher Jain Miller, the co-founder and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Arihanta Institute, completed his PhD in the study of Religion at the University of California, Davis. He is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut and Visiting Professor at Claremont School of Theology where he co-developed and co-runs a remotely available Masters Degree Program focusing on Engaged Jain Studies. His current research focuses on Modern Yoga and Engaged Jainism. Christopher is the author of a number of articles and book chapters concerned with Jainism and the practice of modern yoga.
Dr Suzanne Newcombe
Suzanne Newcombe is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University (UK) where she researches modern yoga from a sociological and social historical perspective. She is also the Director of Inform, a registered charity that researches and provides information on new and minority religions and spiritualities.
Advisory Board
Dr Elizabeth De Michelis
Elizabeth De Michelis has a long standing interest in religions and religious phenomena, especially those concerned with the cultivation of contemplative and meditative, non-secular lifestyles and related practices and theorizations. Her areas of academic expertise are the history of yoga; the intellectual history of modern yoga; modern yoga ideologies, groups and institutions; and western esotericism’s appropriations of South Asian disciplines.
Dr Mark Singleton
Mark Singleton has worked on yoga in tradition and modernity. He was a consultant and catalogue author for the 2013 exhibition ‘Yoga: The Art of Transformation’ at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Between 2015-2020 he was a senior researcher on a five-year European Research Council-funded project entitled ‘The Hatha Yoga Project: Mapping Indian and Transnational Traditions of Physical Yoga through Philology and Ethnography’.
Prof. David Gordon White
David Gordon White received his Ph.D. (with Honors) from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1988. He also studied Hinduism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France, between 1977-1980 and 1985-1986. A specialist of South Asian religions, he is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught from 1996 to 2021.
Prof. Dominik Wujastyk
Dominik Wujastyk was born in London, and spent much of his childhood in Sudan, Uganda and Malta. He has degrees in Physics, and Sanskrit with Pali, and a doctorate in Sanskrit from Oxford University. He has published and taught on the history of Indian medicine and science, the history of Sanskrit grammar, Indian miniature painting, the study and preservation of Sanskrit manuscripts, and the history of yoga philosophy.
Prof. Joseph S. Alter
Joseph S. Alter is the Director of the Asian Studies Center and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the editor of The Journal of Asian Studies (2021 – 2025). His research is on environmental health, the globalization of Asian medical knowledge and the cultural history of yoga’s development within the institutionalized structure of Nature Cure in contemporary India.