Dr. Dominik A. Haas

Dominik A. Haas obtained his PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Vienna in 2022 with a dissertation on the Gāyatrī-Mantra. He has published and given lectures on the topics of Hinduism, Vedic religion, mantras, deification, and yoga. Following an interdisciplinary approach, he combines philological and historical research with methods and insights from various fields, ranging from text linguistics to religious studies. As a co-founder of the Initiative for Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS), Haas is also involved in promoting innovative forms of scholarly communication and fair working conditions in the academic and publishing sector.

Haas has been a research fellow at the Institute since 2020, first as a recipient of the ÖAW DOC Fellowship and now as a Post-DocTrack Fellow. He is currently finalizing a monograph based on his dissertation, which will be published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press in the Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens. In this publication, titled Gāyatrī: Mantra and Mother of the Vedas, Haas reconstructs, for the first time, the history of the Gāyatrī mantra, which, as the most important initiation mantra of Brahmanical Hinduism, has played a central role in the formation of social and religious identity for over 2000 years. Over the course of time it has not only been personified as the mother of the Vedas – the oldest religious literature of South Asia – but has even come to be venerated as a goddess.

In addition to working on his book, Haas is also preparing a new research project that will look at the cultural history of mantras and their recitation. Moreover, he teaches courses on mantras and the history of religion at the University of Vienna.

All publications for download at https://oeaw.academia.edu/DominikAHaas

Current information on https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8505-6112

The Initiative for Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS): https://foasas.org