YogaResearch.org has officially launched on 7th July 2023. The aim of this website is to provide a rich and up-to-date resource for sharing academic research findings and upcoming events in the field of Yoga Studies. Scholars in the field will be contributing regular reflections about recent publications and projects in the field of yoga studies, current events, and offering their insights into the best way to navigate this field of study.
Maya Warrier was a Reader in Religious Studies at the University of Winchester until her retirement in 2020. Her research explored popular Hindu traditions in modern transnational contexts. Her last research projects focused on Ayurveda (the ancient Indian system of medicine) in the UK.
Philipp André Maas is currently a research associate at the Institute for Indology and Central Asian Studies, University of Leipzig and was previously an assistant professor at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. He received his M.A. (1997) and Dr. phil. (2004) degrees from the University of Bonn, Germany, where he studied Indology, Comparative Religious Studies, Tibetology and Philosophy.
A selection of recommended texts and links to SOAS online talks which will help you further explore the subject of Indology. The featured authors are Geoffrey Samuel, Gavin Flood, and Jessica Frazier.
In this episode we talk to Dr Jim Mallinson on the discipline of Indology. What the discipline entails, its place in academia and some of the skills that prove useful when researching the history and culture of Pre-modern India.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
