Dominik A. Haas

Biography

Dominik A. Haas obtained his PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Vienna in 2022 with a dissertation on the Gāyatrī-Mantra. His publications deal with various aspects of Sanskrit literature and the cultural and religious history of South Asia, in particular Vedic texts, mantras, and yoga. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, he combines philological and historical research with methods and insights from various fields, ranging from text linguistics to religious studies. His research has been supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), and the University of Vienna. In addition, he has also gained teaching experience as a freelance instructor (2015–2020), as well as at the University of Vienna (2014–2018, 2023). He has contributed to various FWF-funded projects. As a co-founder of the Initiative for Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS), he is also involved in promoting innovative forms of scholarly communication and fair working conditions in the academic and publishing sector.

Since the beginning of his dissertation project in 2018, Haas’s research has focused on mantras. In 2022, he co-organized an international workshop in preparation for the ERC project “MANTRAMS” together with Carola Lorea, Borayin Larios, Finnian Gerety, and Gudrun Bühnemann (https://doi.org/10.11588/fid4sarep.00004603). In 2023, his dissertation was published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press and awarded the Roland Atefie Prize, which recognizes outstanding doctoral theses in the fields of philosophy, theology, and Indology. In the same year, he obtained third-party funding for developing a research agenda that focuses on the principle of mantra repetition. Within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence “Eurasian Transformations,” he is doing research on the history of mantra repetition practices and the role they played in the formation of religious and social identity.

Haas has published several peer-reviewed articles in internationally recognized journals and regularly presents the results of his research at international conferences. His first monograph, which is based on his dissertation, reconstructs the early history of the Gāyatrī-Mantra, one of the most frequently recited formulas of Hinduism, with the help of philological-historical methods, while also drawing upon perspectives and insights from the field of religious studies (https://doi.org/10.1553/978oeaw93906). His second monograph offers an annotated translation of the Kaṭha-Upaniṣad and introduces text linguistics as a useful hermeneutical tool in the study of heterogeneous and compiled Sanskrit sources (https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1329). Together with Vitus Angermeier, Christian Ferstl, and Channa Li, he has co-edited the proceedings of the International Indology Graduate Research Symposium 2021 (https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1133). Since 2024, he is also member of the Steering Committee of this conference series.