Editorial Team

Gwendolyn Gillson is Associate Professor of Asian Studies in the History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion department at Illinois College. She researches at the intersection of anthropology of religion, religious studies, Japanese studies, and gender studies to trouble the “traditional” narratives of scholarship and society. Her work focuses on otherness, however defined, within larger power structures and attempts to recover and ultimately highlight otherized experiences and ways of being. She is also editor of The Essential Guide to Buddhism with Bloomsbury Academic (2024).

Dr Ruth Westoby is a scholar-practitioner researching Yoga and Indian Religions. Ruth is postdoctoral research fellow in Jaina Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. At OCHS Ruth works on Jain technologies of the body including yoga, asceticism and the soteriological and medical understandings of the body that underly such practices. In addition, Ruth is an Associate Researcher at Inform, based at King’s College London, researching menstruation in contemporary religions. Ruth holds a PhD from SOAS University of London on ‘The Body in Early Haṭha Yoga’ (2024), supervised by Professor James Mallinson and Dr Richard Williams, funded by CHASE-AHRC. Ruth is currently working on a book project from her doctoral thesis, ‘Reversing Reproduction in Haṭha Yoga’. As a practitioner Ruth collaborated with the SOAS Haṭha Yoga Project (2015-2020) interpreting postures from an 18th-century text teaching a precursor of modern yoga, the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, contributing to a new methodology, ‘embodied philology'. Ruth teaches MA Theory and Method in the Study of Religions and undergraduate Religion, Ecology and Politics as Visiting lecturer at Roehampton University, London. Ruth's research interests are the materiality of the body and sexuality from critical theoretical and medical humanities perspectives. See www.enigmatic.yoga for footage and publications.

Graham Harvey is Professor of Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. His research is concerned with the performance and rhetoric of identities among Jews, Pagans and indigenous peoples. He is particularly interested in the ³new animism², embracing relational and material approaches to interactions between humans and the larger than human world. His recent publications include The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013) and Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013).