Rate My Professor Will Sweetman

Professor Will Sweetman serves as Professor of Asian Religions and Head of the Religion Programme within the Division of Humanities at the University of Otago. He earned his BA Honours in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Lancaster, followed by an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Sweetman has taught at universities in London and Newcastle upon Tyne and held research fellowships at Cambridge, Halle, and Hamburg. He joined the University of Otago from a research fellowship in Germany, initially as a lecturer in Asian Religions, and was promoted to Associate Professor before attaining full professorship effective 1 February 2020.

His research focuses on interactions between Asian religions—particularly those of India—and the West in the modern period, encompassing historical and theoretical questions in religious studies, inter-religious encounters in colonial settings, and Christian missions in Africa and Asia. Key publications include Mapping Hinduism: 'Hinduism' and the study of Indian religions, 1600-1776 (Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003), a four-volume collection Hinduism: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies (Routledge, 2014), and Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's Tamil Library (EFEO/IFP, 2012). Recent works feature "Forgeries, falsifications, fictions, fälschungen? Some early modern European “Vedas”" in Entangled Religions (2024), "The accommodation of caste in the Tranquebar Mission (1706–1746)" (2022), "The Absent Vedas" in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (2019), and "Rival mission, rival science? Jesuits and Pietists in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South India" in Comparative Studies in Society & History (2019, with Ines G. Županov). Sweetman serves on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the History of Religions and supervises PhD and MA theses on Asian religions. His teaching includes RELS 209/309 The Body in Asian Religions and the forthcoming RELS 218/318 Yoga: Ancient and Modern in 2025.