Ruth Westoby is a researcher in South Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Jaina Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, focusing on technologies of the body in Jainism and Yoga. As Affiliate Researcher at Inform, King’s College London and Associate Researcher at SOAS, University of London, Ruth researches asceticism and menstruation in yoga, tantra and neo-tantra. Her book project is Bloody Bodies:⁠ Stopping Menstruation in South Asian Religions⁠. She teaches MA Yoga in the Modern World as Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS. Her PhD from SOAS (2024), supervised by Prof. James Mallinson, explored The Body in Early Haṭha Yoga and was funded by CHASE-AHRC. She also collaborated with the SOAS Haṭha Yoga Project (2015-2020) interpreting early modern yoga postures, contributing to the emerging research methodology, ‘embodied philology’.

M. Whitney Kelting is an associate professor of religious studies at Northeastern University. Her book, Singing to the Jinas (OUP 2001), considers how the singing of Jain hymns grants Jain laywomen space for theological thinking and authority. Heroic Wives (OUP 2009) analyzes the complex negotiations laywomen traverse at the intersection of western India ideal for women and Jainism’s demands for laywomen. Her current book project centers on Jain masculinity and economic piety.

Miki Chase is Assistant Professor of South Asian Studies and Śrī Anantnāth Chair in Jain Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2022. Her research explores intersections of law, religion, and gender in the ethics of death and dying. Her current book project is an ethnographic study of women’s social negotiations of the ascetic disposition in sallekhanā, the Jain ritual fast unto death, tracing gendered norms through which Jain women embody doctrinal ideals within urban domestic life, medicalization of death, and shifting legal terrain in India. Her research has been funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.