Dr Ruth Westoby is an academic researcher in Yoga and South Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. Her research focuses on the materiality of the body and sexuality from critical theoretical and medical humanities perspectives. She works with Sanskrit textual sources and participant interviews.
Ruth Westoby is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in Jaina Studies and Yoga Studies. Here Ruth is undertaking a research project on technologies of the body, including yoga, menstruation and stopping menstruation (amenorrhea). In addition, Ruth is an Affiliate Researcher at Inform (Information Network Focus on Religious Movements), based at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, researching menstruation in contemporary religions. Ruth is also book review editor for the journal Body and Religion, published by Equinox.
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’. During her doctoral research Ruth undertook a CHASE-AHRC-funded placement at Inform, studying New Religious Movements 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,
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. Ruth was a founder member and chair of the floodplain meadow restoration campaign Friends of Bartonsham Meadows from 2020 to 2024 when the organisation was dissolved upon successful completion of the project.
Please contact Ruth with queries or opportunities to collaborate at ruthwestoby@gmail.com.
The eleventh century Amṛtasiddhi teaches, for the first time, bodily practices that become central to haṭha yoga. The startling teachings are explained systematically, in terms of the nature of the body, the practices, and the results of the practice in this tantric Buddhist source text. In this course we will read the Sanskrit and discuss in English the section on ‘the body’ as set out in the first four chapters of the Amṛtasiddhi. The course comprises four online sessions and one in-person workshop in London.