Professor Will Sweetman

BA Hons (Lancaster) MPhil PhD (Cambridge)

Professor of Asian Religions
Richardson 5S3, 5th Floor, Richardson South Tower
Tel +64 3 479 8793
Email will.sweetman@otago.ac.nz
academia.edu (to access many of Will's publications)

Will Sweetman studied Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster and received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge.

He has taught at universities in London and Newcastle, and held research fellowships at Cambridge, Halle and Hamburg.

Will is a member of the Heterodox Academy and an ordained Dudeist priest.

Teaching

Will's teaching is focussed on the religions of India.

For many years, he has taught a paper on the culture of the body in Asian religions (RELS 209 / RELS 309 The Body in Asian Religions) and, in 2025, will introduce an entirely new paper on Yoga (RELS 218 / RELS 318 Yoga: Ancient and Modern).

Research

Will's research interests centre on interactions between the religions of Asia and the West in the modern period.

His doctoral research examined accounts of Hinduism in English, Dutch, German and French writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The results of this research were published as Mapping Hinduism.

His recent work has focussed on the textual sources that Europeans relied on for their accounts of Hinduism. He has published on the earliest European engagement with the Vedas and also on a series of dharmaśāstra digests, commissioned by European missionaries and colonial officials in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently writing on early collections of purāṇas, translations of the Bhāgavata  Purāṇa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the circulation of both manuscripts and translations in Europe.

In addition, Will has published on a range of other topics connected with the European presence in India, including the accommodation of caste in both Catholic and Protestant mission, missionary science, mission and empire and the emergence of the idea of a distinctive Dravidian culture.

Postgraduate supervision

Will welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD candidates working on topics in the areas of Asian religions, historical and theoretical questions in the study of religion, inter-religious encounters in colonial contexts, and Christian mission in Africa and Asia.

Recent completions

Phra Akbordin Rattana (PhD 2025) 'A Translation and Comparative Analysis of Pussadeva’s Paṭhamasambodhi'

Gregory Smith, (MA 2025) 'A Hindu Twist to the Panentheist Turn: Comparing Rāmānuja and Krause'

Woramat Malasart, (PhD 2024) 'The Dhammakaya Lemmata from Core Text to Commentary: Buddhist Practices, Manuscript Transmission and Textual Formation in Traditional Buddhism in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia'

Cherie Coley, (MA 2024) 'Rasa: The Theories and Psychology of Aesthetics, Emotion, and Liberation'

Alistair Savai’i Knewstubb (MA 2022) 'Buddhist contemplative techniques will not cause a scientific revolution'

Books

(ed. with Aditya Malik) Hinduism in India: Modern and Contemporary Movements. New Delhi: Sage, 2016
[Preview] [Review]

Hinduism. 4 vols. Critical Concepts in Religious Studies. London: Routledge, 2014
[Details]

Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's Tamil Library. Paris/Pondicherry: EFEO/IFP, 2012
[Read online] [Review] [Review (PDF)]

(translator) Ute Hüsken, Visnu's Children. Prenatal life-cycle rituals in South India. (Ethno-Indology. Heidelberg Studies in South Asian Rituals 9). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009
[Preview]

Mapping Hinduism: 'Hinduism' and the study of Indian religions. 1600-1776. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003
[Download]

A Discovery of the Banian Religion and the Religion of the Persees: a critical edition of two early English works on Indian Religions. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1999
[Preview]