Dominic Goodall is a Sanskritist and historian of religion.
After finishing his BA (Sanskrit with Pali, 1990), he came to Hamburg for two years to learn medieval Tamil with Professor S.A. Srinivasan. He then returned to Oxford, to Wolfson College, where, under the guidance of Professor Alexis Sanderson, he produced a critical edition of the opening chapters of Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s tenth-century commentary on the Kiraṇatantra, which he submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1995 and subsequently published from Pondicherry in 1998.
He became Head of the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO in 2002, where he remained until April 2011. Dominic Goodall is currently a professor (directeur d’études) at the EFEO, co-editor with Dr. Marion Rastelli of the Viennese dictionary of tantric terminology, theTāntrikābhidhānakośa, 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Among his publications are editions and translations of works of poetry in Sanskrit and of hitherto unpublished Śaiva scriptures and theological commentaries. He is part of Pondicherry team editing manual of Śaiva rituals that throws light on Śaiva maṭhas and that survives in a solitary Calcutta manuscript, the Naimittikakriyānusandhāna.
Dominic Goodall is also participating in the editing of epigraphs, particularly those from Cambodia.
