Andrea R. Jain

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Andrea R. Jain is a professor of South Asian religions and yoga. She is known for her writings on modern yoga as exercise, including her 2015 book Selling Yoga: from Counterculture to Pop culture . She is the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR).

Contents

Education

Andrea Jain took her bachelor's degree in psychology, philosophy, and religious studies at Southern Methodist University from 2002 to 2004. She gained her master's degree in religious studies at Rice University from 2004; she continued her studies there with a graduate certificate in women, gender, and sexuality studies, and then a PhD in religious studies, completing her thesis on "Health, Well-Being, and the Ascetic Ideal: Modern Yoga in the Jain Terapanth" in 2010. [1]

Career

Jain is a professor of South Asian religions and yoga at the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts. She joined the faculty of the University of Houston as an adjunct in 2006, moving to the faculty of Rice University in 2009, again as an adjunct. She joined the faculty of Indiana University in 2010 as an assistant professor. She became an associate professor there in 2016, and a full professor in 2021. [1]

She joined the editorial board of Nova Religio in 2011. [1] She has been the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) since 2017. [2] She contributed the essay on modern yoga to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. [3]

Reception

Selling Yoga has been well received by scholars. Joseph Alter, reviewing Selling Yoga in Nova Religio , writes that it is covers in "a carefully argued and exceptionally sensitive and insightful account" both yoga's combination of the body, spirituality, and branding, and the interaction of politics with "the embodied fetishization of cultural heritage and identity." [4]

Maya Warrier writes that Jain "decisively counters the notion that there is such a thing as an 'authentic' form of yoga", arguing instead that yoga has always been "polymorphous and adaptable", fitting into Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. Warrier notes that Jain's account of early Western "entrepreneur-yogis" were all countercultural, appealing to Westerners with "unorthodox" religious views. [5]

Jaime Kucinskas writes that the book insightfully resolves the confusion as to what yoga is and where the modern form of it came from. [6]

Kimberley J. Pingatore, [7] finds that Jain's first two chapters "brilliantly" summarize the research of the major scholars of yoga. [8]

Books

References

  1. 1 2 3 Jain, Andrea R. "CV (click on "CV" to download)". Andrea R. Jain. Retrieved 26 February 2026.
  2. ↑ "Andrea R. Jain". Indiana University . Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  3. ↑ Jain, Andrea (2016). "Modern Yoga". Religion. 1. Oxford. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.163. ISBN   978-0199340378.
  4. ↑ Alter, Joseph (2016). "Review: Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture by Andrea R. Jain". Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. 1 (3): 111–113. doi:10.1525/nr.2016.19.3.111.
  5. ↑ Warrier, Maya (May 2016). "Andrea R. Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, £19.95)". Journal of American Studies. 50 (2): E30. doi:10.1017/S0021875816000335. S2CID   146823827.
  6. ↑ Kucinskas, Jaime (2016). "Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture, by Andrea Jain". Sociology of Religion. 77 (3): 302–304. doi:10.1093/socrel/srw036.
  7. ↑ Pingatore, Kimberley J. (December 2015). Bodies Bending Boundaries: Religious, Spiritual, and Secular Identities of Modern Postural Yoga in the Ozarks. Missouri State University (MA Thesis).
  8. ↑ Pingatore, Kimberley J. (2015). "Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture by Andrea R. Jain, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, ix + 244 pp., ISBN 978-019-939024-3, US$19.95 (paperback)". Religion. 46 (3): 458–461. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2015.1084863. S2CID   147571747.
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