Prof. Dr. James Mallinson

Principal Investigator

James (Jim) Mallinson is the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. From 2013–2023 he worked at SOAS University of London where from 2015–2020 he was the Principal Investigator of the Hatha Yoga Project. Professor Mallinson has a BA in Sanskrit and Old Iranian from the University of Oxford (1991), an MA in South Asian Area Studies (with ethnography as its primary subject) from SOAS (1993) and a DPhil. from the University of Oxford (2001). His doctoral thesis was a critical edition of the Khecarīvidyā, an early text on haṭha yoga, and was supervised by Professor Alexis Sanderson. A revised version of the thesis was published by Routledge in 2007.

After completing his doctoral studies Professor Mallinson worked as a principal translator for the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he produced five volumes of translations of Sanskrit poetry. He has also published translations of two haṭha yoga texts, the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā (2004) and Śivasaṃhitā (2007) for YogaVidya.com. In addition to these books Dr Mallinson has published numerous articles, book chapters and encyclopedia articles. Roots of Yoga, a reader of translations of texts on yoga introduced and edited by Professor Mallinson and Dr Mark Singleton was published in the Penguin Classics series in January 2017.

Professor Mallinson’s primary research method is philology, in particular the study of manuscripts of Sanskrit texts on yoga, which he complements with ethnographic data drawn from extensive fieldwork with Indian ascetics and the study of art historical sources. In recognition of his long association with the Rāmānandī Indian ascetic saṃpradāya, in 2013 the order honoured him with the title of mahant, an event recorded in the Smithsonian Channel’s television documentary West Meets East. His work on art historical depictions of yogis led to his being invited to be a consultant and catalogue author for the 2013 exhibition ‘Yoga: The Art of Transformation’ at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.

Many of Professor Mallinson’s publications may be downloaded from here.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hanneder

Principal Investigator

Jürgen Hanneder has studied Indology, Tibetology and Comparative Religion in Munich, Bochum, and Bonn, where he took his M.A. His interest in the Śaiva traditions of Kashmir led him to Oxford where he studied under the supervision of Alexis Sanderson. After completing his Ph.D. in Indology in Marburg on Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Revelation, and working as a research assistant in Bonn he joined the Mokṣopaya Research Group initiated by Walter Slaje in Halle.  After completing his “Habilitation” in Hamburg (Studies on the Mokṣopāya. Wiesbaden 2006) and after some terms as substitute professor in Freiburg he followed his former teacher Michael Hahn on the chair of Indology in Marburg in 2007. The main areas of his research interests are within classical and modern Sanskrit literature, i.e. poetry, religious and philosophical literature, including Indo-Tibetan studies and occasional excursions into neighboring fields, but a strong focus is on Kashmirian Sanskrit Literature. Hanneder acted as Primary Investigator for the German half of the project and has now become a fan of Yoga and Meditation Studies.

Some online publications: Click.

Complete Bibliography: Click.

Dr. Jason Birch

Senior Researcher

Jason Birch (DPhil, Oxon) is an historian of South Asian traditions of yoga and medicine. He is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Alberta, a Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney. Through extensive fieldwork in India and the reconstruction of Sanskrit primary sources, Birch has revealed the early history of Rājayoga, the supreme yoga of meditation, as well as its physical counterpart, Haṭhayoga (the yoga of force). His research has also identified a corpus of Sanskrit and vernacular texts that emerged during Haṭhayoga’s floruit, the period in which physical yoga flourished on the eve of colonialism.

Among Birch’s major book publications on the history of yoga are A Manual on the Practice of Haṭhayoga: An Edition and Translation of the Pune Manuscript of the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati (with Mark Singleton and James Mallinson), Āsanas of the Yogacintāmaṇi: The Largest Premodern Compilation on Postural Practice, and The Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Gorakṣanātha: The Genesis of Haṭha and Rājayoga. He is also a co-author of the digital critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā, one of the main outputs of the Light on Haṭha Project.

His published work on the history of medicine includes the 2018 publication Premodern Yoga Traditions and Ayurveda: Preliminary Remarks on Shared Terminology, Theory and Praxis (DOI: 10.18732/hssa.v6i0.25), and his co-authorship of the 2023 project book On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose: The Nepalese Version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā (DOI: 10.11588/hasp.1203). In addition to other publications arising from the Suśruta Project, he wrote the chapter “Yoga and Ayurvedic Medicine” for the Comparative Guts project (book DOI: 10.38071/2024-00345-3, and website). He is a major contributor to the continuing work of editing and translating the Nepalese version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, and is preparing a monograph on the concept of wellbeing (svāsthya) in early Ayurveda.

Jason Birch received his bachelor’s degree in Sanskrit and Hindi from the University of Sydney. He was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at Balliol College, Oxford, under Alexis Sanderson. He completed his DPhil in 2013. In 2014, he was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and in 2015 he joined AyurYog, an ERC-funded Project at the University of Vienna. Later that year he joined the five-year Haṭha Yoga Project at SOAS University of London, where he translated and edited Sanskrit texts on Haṭha and Rājayoga. He is a founding member of SOAS’s Centre for Yoga Studies and of the diamond open-access Journal of Yoga Studies.

Dr. Mitsuyo Demoto

Senior Researcher

Mitsuyo Demoto studied Sanskrit Language and Literature at Kyoto University, Japan, where she took an M.A. and a Ph.D. Her main focus was on Buddhist narrative literature in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. After several years of research and teaching activities at Japanese universities, she came to Marburg in 2000 as a Postdoctoral Fellow for Research Abroad of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and gained experience in textual criticism. Since 2009 she has been involved in various DFG projects on the cataloguing and editing of Sanskrit manuscripts.

Dr. des. Nils Jacob Liersch

Researcher

Nils Jacob Liersch is an Indologist who earned his doctorate at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Philipps University Marburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hanneder. In his dissertation, he produced a critical edition and annotated translation of the Tattvayogabindu, a previously little-studied Sanskrit manual on fifteen different forms of yoga, composed in the middle of the 16th century for a non-ascetic, courtly audience.

From 2021 to 2024, he was a research associate in the international research project Light on Haṭha, based at SOAS University of London, the University of Oxford, and the University of Marburg. As part of this project, the first critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā, one of the most important texts of classical yoga literature, was produced.

Since November 2024, he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project Saving the Kashmirian Sanskrit Heritage at Philipps University Marburg. His work focuses on a monograph about the largely forgotten yoga texts of the Kashmir Valley, including titles such as Amaraughaśāsana, Matsyodara, and Ṣaṭcakranirṇaya.