Prof. Dr. James Mallinson

Principal Investigator.

James (Jim) Mallinson read Sanskrit for his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford from 1988 to 1991, then took an MA at SOAS in South Asian Studies, with ethnography as his primary subject, for which he wrote a dissertation on Indian asceticism. He returned to Oxford in 1995 for doctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Alexis Sanderson. His thesis was a critical edition of a haṭhayoga text called Khecarīvidyā, and his work on that was the first step in a nearly three-decade-long career whose main research focus has been the history of haṭhayoga and its practitioners, primarily through text-critical study but also through art-historical materials and fieldwork among ascetics in India today. He has spent several years living with Indian ascetics and, in 2013, was honored with the title of “Mahant” by the Rāmānandī Saṃpradāya at the Allahabad Kumbh Mela.

In addition to his work on yoga, from 2002–to 2008 Jim was a principal translator for the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he produced five volumes of translations of Sanskrit poetry, including Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta (in Messenger Poems), the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (in two volumes entitled The Emperor of the Sorcerers) and some of the Kathāsaritsāgara (in two volumes entitled The Ocean of the River of Stories). He has published several articles on the history of yoga, four books on haṭhayoga texts (translations of the Gheraṇḍasaṃhitā and Śivasaṃhitā published by YogaVidya.com in 2005 and 2007, and two critical editions, The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha, Routledge 2007, and, with Péter-Dániel Szántó, The Amṛtasiddhi, and Amṛtasiddhimūla, EFEO 2021), and an anthology of texts on yoga (Roots of Yoga, with Mark Singleton, Penguin Classics, 2017). Many of his publications can be found on his academia.edu page.

From 2013 to 2023 Jim had the Sanskrit position at SOAS University of London before, in 2023, taking up the Boden chair of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford.

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.

After completing a first class honours degree in Sanskrit and Hindi at the University of Sydney under Dr Peter Oldmeadow, Jason was awarded a Clarendon scholarship to undertake a DPhil in Oriental Studies at Balliol College, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Alexis Sanderson, All Souls College. His dissertation (submitted 2013) focused on the earliest known Rājayoga text called the Amanaska and included a critical edition and annotated translation of this Sanskrit work along with a monographic introduction which examines the influence of earlier Śaiva tantric traditions on the Amanaska as well as the significance of the Amanaska in more recent yoga traditions.

In 2014 Jason was a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a visiting associate professor at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. In 2015 he was invited to research the histories of yoga, āyurveda and rasaśāstra as a visiting post-doctoral fellow on a project called Ayuryog at the University of Vienna. He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at SOAS University of London on the Haṭha Yoga Project, which has been funded for five years by the ERC. His area of research is the history of physical yoga on the eve of colonialism. He is editing and translating six texts on Haṭha and Rājayoga, which are outputs of the project, and supervising the work of two research assistants at the Ecole française d’ Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry.

At SOAS Jason has taught two courses for the MA in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation and a Sanskrit reading course for fourth-year undergraduates. He has given seminars on the history of yoga for MA programs at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy and Won Kwang University in Iksan, South Korea. He also collaborates with Jacqueline Hargreaves on The Luminescent.

Read some of Jason Birch’s work.

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.