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Ruth Westoby is a doctoral candidate at SOAS University of London and she teaches for SOAS YogaStudies Online. Ruth’s thesis is a historical textual study of the yoga body in Sanskrit sources on early haṭhayoga identifying the functional paradigms of the body that explain how yoga works. As a practitioner Ruth has collaborated on the reconstruction of historical textual sequences of postures, contributing to the development of a new methodology: embodied philology. Ruth’s 2021 article, ‘Raising rajas in haṭha yoga and beyond’, appears in Religions of South Asia, also published by Equinox. Her research interests include yoga, the body, gender, textual history and critical theory.