Dominic Goodall

Portrait of Dominic   Goodall

Dominic Goodall is a Sanskritist (with a solid Greek and Latin linguistics background) and historian in religion. After completing his BA (Sanskrit with Pali, 1990) at Oxford University, he came to Hamburg for two years to learn medieval Tamil with Professor S.A. Srinivasan.

Back to Oxford under the guidance of Professor Alexis Sanderson, he produced a critical edition of the opening chapters of Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s 10th-century commentary on the Kiraṇatantra (doctoral thesis in 1995, published in Pondicherry in 1998). 

He became Head of the EFEO (Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient) Pondicherry Center in 2002, where he remained until April 2011. A professor (directeur d’études) at the EFEO, he co-edited with Dr. Marion Rastelli the Viennese dictionary of tantric terminology, the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, and a contributor to the Hamburg Encyclopaedia of Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa (EMCAA).

Among his publications are editions and translations of works of poetry in Sanskrit and of unpublished Śaiva scriptures and theological commentaries. Dominic Goodall is also participating in the editing of epigraphs, particularly Cambodian ones.