People – Patrons

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.

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.