people
Dominik Wujastyk, Principal Investigator
I have undergraduate degrees in Physics (Imperial College, London) and Sanskrit (University of Oxford), and a DPhil in Sanskrit specializing in Sanskrit grammar (University of Oxford). My doctoral studies were partly carried out at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Sanskrit at the University of Pune, India. My teachers in Oxford were Thomas Burrow, Alexis Sanderson, Richard Gombrich and Bimal Krishna Matilal (DPhil supervisor) and, in India, Shivram Dattatray Joshi, Venkatesh Laxman Joshi, Vaman Balkrishna Bhagavat, and Saroja Bhate. For many years I worked at the Wellcome Institute and later at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London where I researched the history of science and medicine in early India, with special reference to printed and manuscript evidence in the original Sanskrit-language sources. From 2015-2024 I held the Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Polity and Society in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta in Canada, where I am currently Professor Emeritus. My university website.
Many of my publications can be downloaded at ORCID or Academia.edu. My informal writings on various topics can be read in my blog, Cikitsā. I founded and am on the editorial board of the academic journal History of Science in South Asia, and book series with the publishers Brill and Motilal Banarsidass.
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 has edited and published numerous haṭha yoga texts including the Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Gorakṣanātha (2024), and the Yogacintāmaṇi (2024).
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.
Tyler Neill, Project Consultant
Tyler Neill is a Sanskritist and software engineer who gained his PhD at Leipzig for his thesis Intertextual Readings of the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa on Buddhist Anti-Realism. He is especially well known amongst Indologists for his websites Skrutable, Vātāyana and Pāṇḍitya, though which he expresses his multi-faceted engagement with Digital Humanities as applied to Sanskrit language and literature.
Further information on Tyler’s scholarly engagements can be found on his website, https://www.tylerneill.info.
Collaborators
The SSHRC defines Insight Grant “project collaborators” as
An individual, participating in a grant application, who may make a significant contribution to the intellectual direction of the research or research-related activity, and who may play a significant role in the conduct of the research or research-related activity.
The following scholars generously agreed to act as collaborators on this project: