Mark Singleton

In 2017, he co-authored with James Mallinson the book Roots of Yoga, a collection of mostly original translations of over one hundred yoga texts, mainly from Sanskrit but also including Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Pali, Kashmiri, and early forms of Marathi and Hindi. Its eleven themed chapters cover many of the traditional practices of yoga (such as āsana, prāṇāyāma, mudrā, meditation, and mantra) as well as essential contexts for practising yoga (such as preliminaries to yoga practice, the yogic body, special powers (siddhi), and liberation (mokṣa)). The book has a main introduction summarizing the history of yoga and yoga scholarship, and each chapter has its own shorter contextual introduction and notes.

In 2016, his work was featured in a BBC Radio 4 program by Mukti Jain Campion entitled "The Secret History of Yoga".

In 2014, he and Ellen Goldberg edited the collection Gurus of Modern Yoga.

He is a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He was co-chair for the American Academy of Religions group studying yoga in theory and practice. In 2013, he served as consultant for the Smithsonian exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation, contributing also to the exhibition catalogue.

In 2010 Singleton published a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis on modern yoga, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice; it argues that certain modern forms of yoga represent a radical reworking of the haṭha yoga tradition in both content (dropping most haṭha practices other than āsanas) and purpose (exercise rather than mokṣa, spiritual liberation), and that the incorporation of many standing āsanas into popular yoga reflects the rise of systems of modern physical culture (such as Niels Bukh's Primitive Gymnastics) widespread in India during the 20th century. He has written about his work in The New York Times and the Yoga Journal, including a tribute to B. K. S. Iyengar.

In 2009, he and Jean Byrne edited the collection Yoga in the Modern World.

Returning to England, he gained his Ph.D. in divinity at Cambridge University under the supervision of Elizabeth De Michelis. He is a qualified teacher of Iyengar Yoga and Satyananda Yoga. From 2006 to 2013 he taught at St John's College, Santa Fe.

Mark Singleton spent three years in India in the 1990s learning yoga intensively, both physically and mentally, and discovering that authentic, traditional Indian yoga was strikingly difficult to find: the classes and workshops that he took were aimed mostly at "Western yoga pilgrims". He practised yoga for two and a half hours early each morning, spent the day studying the history and philosophy of yoga, and then taught or attended a yoga class. His discovery that modern āsana-based yoga had much more recent origins than was claimed for it caused him "something like a crisis of faith".

Mark Singleton (born 1972) is a scholar of yoga and Senior Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London, where he works on the European Research Council-funded Hatha Yoga Project. He is the author of the widely-read study of modern postural yoga Yoga Body : the Origins of Modern Posture Practice (2010), based on his PhD thesis; it argued that certain posture-based forms of modern yoga represent, in large part, a radical break from haṭha yoga tradition, with different goals, and an unprecedented emphasis on āsanas. His 2017 book Roots of Yoga is an extensive collection of translations of yoga practice texts. He has written many academic articles and edited three collections of scholarship on yoga.