Jason Birch is a scholar of medieval hatha yoga and a founding member of SOAS's Centre for Yoga Studies.

Biography

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.^[1][2] He completed his DPhil there in 2013.^[1] 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.^[1] He is a founding member of SOAS's Centre for Yoga Studies.^[3]

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.^[4]

Works

Articles

• Birch, Jason (2011). "The Meaning of haṭha in Early Haṭhayoga". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 131 (4): 527–554.
• Birch, Jason (2014). "Rājayoga: The Reincarnations of the King of All Yogas". International Journal of Hindu Studies. 17 (3): 399–442. doi:10.1007/s11407-014-9146-x. S2CID 255168404.
• Birch, Jason (2018). "Premodern Yoga Traditions and Ayurveda". History of Science in South Asia. 6 (6): 1–83. doi:10.18732/hssa.v6i0.25.
• Birch, Jason; Singleton, Mark (2019). "The Yoga of the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati: Haṭhayoga on the Cusp of Modernity". Journal of Yoga Studies. 2 (1): 3–70. doi:10.34000/JoYS.2019.V2.002. S2CID 214332750.
• Birch, Jason (2019). "The Amaraughaprabodha: New Evidence on the Manuscript Transmission of an Early Work on Haṭha- and Rājayoga". Journal of Indian Philosophy. 47 (5): 947–977. doi:10.1007/s10781-019-09401-5. S2CID 198531075.

Book chapters

• Birch, Jason (2018). "The Proliferation of Āsana-s in Late Mediaeval Yoga Texts". In Karl Baier; Philipp A. Maas; Karin Preisendanz (eds.). Yoga in Transformation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress. ISBN 978-3847108627.
• Birch, Jason (2020). "Haṭhayoga's Floruit on the Eve of Colonialism". In Goodall, Dominic; Hatley, Shaman; Isaacson, Harunaga; Raman, Srilata (eds.). Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in Honour of Alexis G.J.S. Sanderson. Leiden: Brill. pp. 451–479.
• Birch, Jason (2020). "The Quest for Liberation-in-Life: A Survey of Early Works on Haṭha- and Rājayoga". In Flood, Gavin (ed.). Hindu Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 200–242.