Research Fellow

Jason Birch, Senior Research Fellow

Jason Birch is a scholar of medieval haṭha yoga and a founding member of SOAS’s Centre for Yoga Studies. His research includes locating and translating early yoga manuscripts, and preparing critical editions, such as of the Amaraugha. He was a participant in the first Suśruta Project from 2021-2025.

Birch’s 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 Suśruta Project publications, 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.

Birch has edited and published numerous haṭha yoga texts including the Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Gorakṣanātha (2024), and the Yogacintāmaṇi (2024). Other publications are listed at The Luminescent’s publications page.

Jason Birch gained his bachelor’s degree in Sanskrit and Hindi at the University of Sydney. He won a Clarendon Scholarship to attend Balliol College, Oxford to study the Amanaska, the earliest rāja yoga text, under Alexis Sanderson. He completed his DPhil there in 2013. In 2014 he joined the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies as a research fellow. From 2015 he took part in the five-year Haṭha Yoga Project at SOAS University of London, where he has been translating and editing Sanskrit texts on haṭha yoga and rāja yoga. He is a founding member of SOAS’s Centre for Yoga Studies. He is also a member of the Light on Haṭha Yoga Project.

His partner is the yoga scholar-practitioner Jacqueline Hargreaves, co-founder of the open-access platform for yoga research The Luminescent, and a founding member of the peer-reviewed Journal of Yoga Studies.