APRIL 2022 —- STOP PRESS!!!
Dear Readers, please note that the website is currently frozen and not being updated. Since its beginnings in 2006 the site has been consistently acknowledged as a very useful resource for yoga studies, but is in need of some rethinking and restructuring to get it up to date. The site managers and other interested parties are looking into the matter, and we hope that a new version of the site will be offered to the public in due course. In the meantime, do feel free to enjoy its contents, and thank you for your interest in our work!
Yoga originated in South Asia, but nowadays it is found almost everywhere: it has become a global, international phenomenon. However, accurate information about modern yoga studies and about yoga’s roots, history, culture and philosophy can be difficult to find. The research that exists on these topics could be described as being ‘locked up’ in university libraries and discussed only by academics.
This website aims to help you find out more about established and current research into modern yoga and, more generally, about some of the most informative research on earlier forms of yoga. These are different but overlapping fields, and we believe that it is when they come together that a deeper understanding of modern yoga can happen.
We also want to bring you into contact with leading international scholars in these fields. This site’s contributors are typically university academics engaged in teaching, and in the professional study of forms of modern yoga and/or of South Asian history, culture and languages. But they are also sympathetic to the situation of committed practitioners who would like to find out more about the roots of their own practice and the wider context of yoga, whether contemporary or ancient.
Here you can find out who is active in the above areas of research and access, in some cases via direct downloads, some of their most relevant contributions.
There are other scholars of yoga and modern yoga that are not listed on this site: selecting them and collating their information takes time in already busy lives. We plan to add more as time goes by.
We hope you will find this website interesting and useful.