Dr Karen O'Brien-Kop is a Lecturer in Asian Religions and Ethics at the University of Roehampton. She researches classical South Asian Sanskrit texts and culture on meditation and yoga, philosophy of mind, and mind-body practices – in particular exploring the interconnections of Hinduism and Buddhism. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Religions of South Asia and Journal of Indian Philosophy, was co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020), and is publishing a monograph with Bloomsbury Academic titled Rethinking Classical Yoga and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (forthcoming). Karen is co-convenor of the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions and at the American Academy of Religion serves on the steering committee for the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit as well as being co-chair of the Indian and Chinese Religions Compared Unit.
Karen O’Brien-Kop is Lecturer in Asian Religions and Ethics at University of Roehampton, and was previously a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS University of London. She holds an MA from SOAS in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation, and a PhD from SOAS on the yoga of Patanjali in relation to Buddhist textual accounts of yoga in the first millennium CE. She was a co-founder of the Sanskrit Reading Room at SOAS and a committee member of the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies. She has published in the journal Religions of South Asia (2017) and is currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (forthcoming 2020).
