Ruth Westoby

Dr Ruth Westoby is an academic researcher in Yoga and Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. Her research focuses on the materiality of the body and sexuality from a critical theoretical and medical humanities perspectives. She works with Sanskrit textual sources and participant interviews.

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 working on a book project from her doctoral thesis that passed without corrections, ‘Reversing Reproduction in Haṭha Yoga’. Her next research project explores menstruation in religious contexts. Ruth is an Associate Researcher at Inform, the research institute specialising in contemporary religions, where she undertook a CHASE-AHRC placement in 2023. In 2022-3 she undertook a similarly funded placement at the Royal Asiatic Society working with their manuscript collections and in particular the 1363 Śārṅgadharapaddhati. Ruth published early research findings in the peer-reviewed Religions of South Asia (2021) and numerous public articles. 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 in 2016 and 2017. This contributed to the development of a new methodology, ‘embodied philology’. In 2010 she received an MA in Indian Religions from SOAS, University of London, with Distinction.

Ruth is Visiting Lecturer in Asian Religions at Roehampton University, teaching postgraduate theory and method in the study of religion and undergraduate courses on Asian religions, cultures and ethics, contemporary issues in global religions, being human and religion, ecology and politics. Ruth serves on the steering committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies, the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit of the American Academy of Religions and the organising committee for YDYS 2026. For articles and podcasts see www.enigmatic.yoga.