Research Fellow

Jason Birch, Senior Research Fellow

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.

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.

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 also a co-author of the digital critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā, one of the main outputs of the Light on Haṭha Yoga Project.

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.